Plantronics 2015 Annual Report Download - page 6

Dear Fellow Stockholders,
Plantronics continued to achieve solid results in fiscal year 2015, growing net revenues by 6% to a record $865 million. Non-GAAP
operating income increased 7% to a record $178 million and earnings per share grew by 7% to a record $3.04.
Revenues for Unified Communications (“UC”) products increased by 18% and represented 23% of our corporate revenues, up from
20% in the prior year. UC continues to be our key strategic focus, and with the vast majority of the UC opportunity still ahead of us,
we believe we are in the very beginning stage of a potentially long period of growth.
A few key points on our fiscal year and strategic progress:
First, our success and product differentiation in all product groups remains outstanding and our pace of innovation is unequaled.
We are focusing our innovation and development on simplicity, enhancing productivity and improving intelligence for our customers.
We refer to these as innovation waves.
The first innovation wave is “taming the communications chaos.”
As technology proliferates and the number of devices and tools we use for communications grows, the complexity increases both for
end-users and IT departments who are managing and supporting them.
People have at their disposal a rapidly growing number of product features and functionalities, but currently the complexities of
integrating and using them efficiently hampers efforts to convert the capabilities to reality. Our customers need to seamlessly and
easily connect to a growing variety of devices and applications, and we’re working hard to meet their expectations that “everything just
works” automatically, and intuitively, when and how they expect. Our management tools enable IT to understand critical status and
compatibility issues and resolve them immediately. By providing better integration, smarter devices and IT management tools we are
already making great progress to help our customers simplify their lives.
Many of our enterprise and consumer solutions already include sensors to automatically answer calls and to seamlessly transfer calls
between devices based on user movements. This year we intend to further our efforts to broaden the integration capabilities and make
devices easier to use to their full potential.
The second innovation wave to enhance productivity is what we refer to as “In the Zone”.
We all know what it feels like to be at peak productivity in what is commonly referred to as “the Zone”. You can feel this at any time in
any activity. You feel like you are accomplishing your goals and tasks almost effortlessly. Whether you’re in a conversation, exercising,
or engaged in a project at work. Most people report feeling this optimal productivity only about 20% of the time while at work.
We are working to actively enhance the productivity of workers as they change environments, or as the environment around them
changes. The benefits of workers being in the Zone are tremendous and the costs to companies when they are not can be enormous.
For example, if an employee is focused on a task and is interrupted, it can take an average of 6 minutes to get back to the Zone for
simple tasks and half hour or more for innovative work. Plantronics’ goal is to enable people to perform, feel and be at their best at
whatever they are doing, wherever they are doing it. For instance, the pioneering technology we’ve created to mask unwanted noise
and sounds is being integrated into our products, allowing people to reduce interruptions, particularly in open floor plan environments.
We also intend to use our acoustics expertise to provide holistic solutions modeled on our own Smarter Working environments to help
organizations solve noise and productivity issues throughout their workspaces. This second innovation wave represents a major growth
opportunity that extends our current reach while also supporting our core business.
The third innovation wave is driving Smarter Customer Interactions and is made possible through the unique and proprietary
intelligence.
The demand for better intelligence is driven by the need of our customers to increase loyalty and differentiate the services they provide
from those of their competition. Our deep background in contextual intelligence helps businesses implement Smarter Customer
Interactions in sophisticated and measurable ways. For example, contact centers need to deliver great customer experiences while
continually reducing costs. Our products improve both the cost effectiveness as well as the customer experience contact centers can
provide. For instance, by understanding when agents go on “mute” and when there is excessive cross-talk (an agent and customer
speaking concurrently) we can alert supervisors to potential problems before they escalate. We also help customers monitor customer
service agents as they log into networks, route calls, and track assets. These features are being made easier to implement for IT
Departments by such innovations as our new portfolio of digital adapters that are integrated with technology from industry leaders
like Interactive Intelligence and Avaya for their new contact center platforms. These innovations are a part of a solutions-focused
portfolio with the qualities of simplicity, performance, flexibility and contextual intelligence our customers tell us they need and value.
LETTER FROM THE CEO