A Chinese New Year Letter from Eric Pan

Hi Seeed customers and partners,

2015 was huge.
For Star Wars, 40 years has passed but the story changed little. The force still be with you, yet with new leader who knows hardware.
For Seeed, we rode a big wave of maker buzz. Many doors are opened, as established players are eager to reunite crowd innovations. We are thrilled for all kinds of new collaborations across different fields.

Looking back 2015,
we reorganize our way to embrace the maker ecosystem by clearly dividing our work into 3 parts, prototype with modules, produce with agile manufacture service and promote on our platforms.

#PROTOTYPE
1202911 pieces of prototyping modules shipped to 160 countries.
Besides traditional product lines, we worked hard to lower hardware barrier by wrapping technology details in different manners. We proudly launched our first ever Kickstarter campaigns for 2 featured products.
– Wio Link to help app developers hands on hardware easily.
2,598 backers pledged $172,422 to help bring this project to life.
– RePhone, open source modular phone which comes as a kit with ready to use software, hardware and initial enclosure. 3,399 backers pledged $276,865 to help bring this project to life.

#PRODUCE
409850 pieces of hardware produced for 10987 makers
We had our US office setup and running as part of effort to distribute manufacture capacity evenly! Via open parts library, we are enabling more products to overcome majority of sourcing issues like cost, lead time and quality.

#PROMOTE
With prime minister’s visit, Seeed became the epicenter of maker culture in China.
Chinese prime minister visited Chaihuo Maker Space in last Feb, creating a nationwide buzz of hardware innovation. 4 months later, Maker Faire Shenzhen, in its 4th year, draw 200,000 visitors with guests such as Massimo Banzi, Kevin Kelly and even Hackaday team. Thanks to the rising popularity of maker culture in China, our maker education program in school contributed 15% of sales in 2015.

However, we have a lot to improve to deliver a sound and excellent service.
Followed with tremendous growth in our business, we has faced tough management challenges, as a result in late responses, logistic problem, stock management issues. We’d really appreciate your patience and understanding. It is prioritized on our to-do list. We will share more info in Q1, about the logistic/response statistic to different countries.

As usual, we will work closely with our partners from silicon to cloud to present you the latest technologies. Mostly focus on IoT in buildings, trying to enable more home brew IoT applications that can be easily created by everyone. A special consideration from us would be how the technology will not be only for prototyping but also supply chain friendly, enable more ideas grow easily into scalable products.

Back to the beginning of Seeed Studio, first Seeeduino was born because of your generous inputs and we always appreciate customer opinions. Let’s reopen the conversations and please join us to develop latest products you desire to make stuffs with!

Starting from this week, Seeed will hibernate a bit for Chinese Spring festival til 13th. Please excuse us for a while, and Happy (Chinese) New Year of the Monkey!

Best Regards,
Eric Pan and Seeed team

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