American Power Conversion Corporation - Becoming a Giant in the 1990s
Becoming a Giant in the 1990s
The 1990s began with another move of the company's headquarters and an award to APC's influential leader. In 1990, Inc. recognized Dowdell as the magazine's New England "Entrepreneur of the Year," the same year the company moved its headquarters to West Kingston, Rhode Island. A look inside the company's new offices reflected Dowdell's focus on the manufacturing side of APC's operations. The offices, with papers stacked on the floor and only the bare minimum of furniture, belied the success the company was enjoying. All the trappings of a company fast on the rise were found in its production plant, a facility outfitted with an automated assembly line that placed and soldered components onto circuit boards. APC's strength was in its products, and as the 1990s began it possessed the products that would capture the bulk of the decade's business. The company introduced its Smart-UPS brand in 1990, a line of products that grew to become the industry's leading network power protection solution.
APC grew with ferocity during the 1990s, expanding its presence across the globe as sales skyrocketed. The company entered the surge protection market in 1991 and the UPS market for mainframe computers the following year. In 1994, APC made its first move overseas, where most of the company's products would be produced in the future. The first plant was established in Galway, Ireland, and was followed by a plant in the Philippines in 1996. At the end of 1996, Dowdell announced he was planning to build seven new plants in 1997 at a cost of between $10 million and $15 million each. His ambition was justifiable. The $35 million company that exited the 1980s generated $515 million in sales in 1995. A giant in the making, APC was seizing the opportunities produced by the terrific growth of the computer industry.
Exponential growth prompted Dowdell to push forward and expand APC's business scope. As the company built new manufacturing plants in Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere, its long-term leader sized up other avenues of growth for the company. In 1998, APC spent nearly $70 million for Silicon A/S, a Denmark-based company that ranked as the third largest supplier of UPS products in Europe. The acquisition gave the company products designed for systems that used large amounts of electricity, such as those found at large data-storage centers and mainframe computer facilities. In 2000, Dowdell acquired EnergyOn.com, an Internet company that allowed customers in deregulated energy markets to shop for the most inexpensive electricity and natural gas prices. The acquisition pointed APC in two new directions, toward e-commerce and toward the energy marketing business. In the years to come, the company was expected to continue to diversify its interests.
As APC made its way in the early years of the 21st century, it exuded enormous strength. The pace of sales growth recorded during the first half of the 1990s continued during the late 1990s. In 1998, APC became the first company focused on UPS products to generate $1 billion in sales, posting $1.1 billion in revenue for the year. The company ended the decade with $1.3 billion in sales and began to demonstrate less vigorous growth at the dawn of the 21st century, as recessive economic conditions and a downturn in the technology sector delivered stinging blows. Despite the absence of frenetic sales growth—difficult to achieve for a company of APC's size—the company stood strong in the early years of the century's first decade, fueling optimism for a successful future.
As APC neared its 25th anniversary, the company stood atop its industry. Revenues reached nearly $1.5 billion in 2003, a year that offered evidence of the company's prowess. In a survey conducted by Computer Reseller News, solution providers selected APC as the winner in the UPS category. The company trounced its competition, emerging the favorite in 10 out of 11 criteria used to judge performance and customer satisfaction. The company's dominance must have provided satisfaction to Dowdell, whose tenure at APC had seen the march of UPS products from the periphery of the computer industry to its center. On the company's web site in 2004, Dowdell reflected on the growth of the UPS market and APC's fortune to have abandoned designing solar power products. "In 1984, when we built our first UPS," Dowdell wrote, "I don't think anyone at APC could have imagined a better scenario for the company than what we are seeing today. Data has become money, and it is flying around the globe, without bounds, at an incredible rate of speed. As a company we could not have hoped for a better business opportunity than one in which network downtime correlates to a loss of revenue."
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