Manufacturer of the Year APAC 2025: Netgear

• Features

• 15/10/2025

Supply chain shortages, escalating tariffs, economic slowdowns… the AV industry has had its fair share of headwinds in recent years. These challenges have tested even the strongest of manufacturers. To not just survive but thrive requires grit, agility, and a ‘future-forward’ vision.

Few manufacturers have done this as impressively as Netgear. Approaching its 30th anniversary next year, the company has already begun its celebrations by clinching the Manufacturer of the Year APAC Award at the Inavate APAC Awards 2025. Reflecting on the achievement, Richard Jonker, vice president of marketing and business development at Netgear, says: “We were very hopeful and thankful, even though the win took us by surprise. The company has been growing since we were a founding member of SDVoE in early 2017, and we haven’t stopped growing more than 30% year on year, which means our business has grown more than 1,000% since then. Everyone likes a growing vendor especially if you grow with them, and I believe this is what earned us the recognition.”

Jonker is modest about Netgear’s success, giving credit to the people behind the scenes: “This Award and recognition isn’t just for the products we’ve created. There’s a huge human factor that we need to credit. We’re human beings at the end of the day, and this shows in the way we go to the market. If you have a technical problem, you just have to call us and we’ll solve it immediately. I believe our success comes from the ease of using Netgear’s products, the approachability of our team, and the way we do business.”

Continued growth in APAC

APAC is a notoriously challenging market given the sheer size and diversity of it. The region presents diverse business environments, regulatory frameworks, and customer needs. Many manufacturers dip their toes in the region to “test” its potential. While some succeed and some fail, Netgear has never treated APAC as an experimental testbed.

From the start, the APAC region was part of its DNA. Jonker shares: “The company was founded by Patrick Lo, who was from Hong Kong. A few years after our inception, we already began building offices in the APAC region. We had a presence early on, not just in one country, but in different countries. We built our base in Hong Kong, and then Singapore and our engineering resources have been concentrated in India for the past 20 years. We also have offices in key markets like Japan and South Korea. I believe our pan-APAC presence has contributed a lot to our success. Our global executives go the lengths to travel frequently to APAC and be on the ground with our partners and customers. We also develop our products here which gives us a greater understanding of the APAC market, its strengths, and its weaknesses.”

More recently, Netgear made headlines in May with the acquisition of VAAG Systems and the establishment of a new software development centre in Chennai, India. Jonker explains the rationale behind this decision: “We were looking to strengthen our engineering skills, particularly in software-defined networking, cloud networking, and AI. We weren’t looking for just one or two people. We needed a full team to take our cloud-managed networking to the next level. On the radar at that time was also adding enterprise-level security, which we didn’t yet have. There was definitely a skill gap.”

He continues: “When we started discussing strategy, the question was: Where do we find the engineers who can take us to the next century? That’s when we started talking to VAAG. We quickly realised they had everything we needed in terms of capabilities but they needed a larger home to thrive. As a standalone engineering outfit without the backing of a major manufacturer, it’s hard to scale. Meanwhile, we were already focusing on expanding our software engineering base in India. VAAG, being based in Chennai, fit our vision perfectly. Today, the VAAG team is deeply embedded into Netgear’s engineering structure and we’ve already made some organisational changes to reflect that by shifting our senior leadership from the US to India.”

Making tech accessible

The AV industry has come a long way since the early adoption days of AV over IP, and AV has since started speaking the language of IT more fluently now. But there are still key challenges that present barriers of entry for integrators who want to move beyond simply discussing AV over IP to actually implementing it.

With this in mind, Jonker shares how Netgear aims to make AV-over-IP deployments easier for integrators: “We recognise that the education curve for AV over IP is steep because the technology isn’t the easiest. So what we do at Netgear is to simplify the entire process by making the hardware and software accessible and as integrator-friendly as possible. Our products are optimised specifically for the AV industry rather than repurposed IT equipment, and on our end we focus a lot on pre-programming so that integrators don’t have to deal with the complex stuff.”

According to the manufacturer, Netgear’s M4350 series of AV switches with support for the SMPTE ST 2110 IP broadcast standard have made a particular impact in the APAC region by democratising access to broadcast-quality networking. On the software side, Netgear AV OSTM and Engage Controller software provide pre-configured profiles certified by nearly 500 AV manufacturers across all major audio, video, and lighting protocols with the aim of simplifying the integration process.

Most recently, Netgear’s commitment is reflected in its decision to join the OpenAV Cloud initiative, which seeks to advance cloud-managed AV infrastructure through software defined systems.

If Netgear’s trajectory is anything to go by, the company’s next three decades will be even more transformative than its first. Jonker concludes: “What’s happening now is that AV, especially AV over IP, is growing faster in APAC than anywhere else. Technology adoption isn’t the issue in this region because people embrace it readily. And because of the sheer size of the markets and distribution complexity, APAC really drives a lot of growth. India, China, and the countries in between make up half the world’s population, and this is where such solutions can scale rapidly. Ultimately, it’s about cultural savviness combined with products that aren’t overly complex or ‘enterprise-y’ which makes Netgear’s solutions especially well-suited for this region.”