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Belkin, as a lot of successful tech companies in America, was founded in a garage in California by today’s CEO Chet Pipkin in 1983. As he himself stated he was always focused towards resolving customer’s problems with ingenious solutions. At that time Chet was hard at work of manufacturing computer cables and assemblies which were sold to larger dealers of computer equipment. This is the time when home computer industry was very young, but with an obvious tendency of growth, which made this an ideal business.

Chet Pipkin (left), Steve Bellow (right)  – Belkin Founders

Because of the time of founding, Belkin experienced exponential growth. By 1996, Chet Pipkin was recognized as the most successful entrepreneur of California in 1996 when he received the reward for said title.

In 2003, Belkin was looking into joining the networking equipment race. They did receive some criticism due to unethical advertising integrated into a router developed that same year. This decision backfired slightly, since it basically, at times, took over the user’s HTTP request and replaced it with an advertisement for their own proprietary filtering software.

In 2009 some more mischief by Belkin’s employee was allegedly done. A person working in online sales department was accused of posting fake reviews of a not so well made Belkin router on Amazon, Buy.com and Newegg. Obviously, this was not company’s malpractice, yet an individual’s wrongdoing. Later that year Gizmodo published a letter they received from a Belkin employee, where it was stated that Belkin has a practice of getting positive reviews at whatever price, even going into writing bad reviews towards competitor’s similar products.

In 2013 a rather significant milestone was reached. This is the year when Belkin acquired Linksys, with plans to continue selling and marketing products maintaining the Linksys branding, which became one of the best networking equipment hardware brands at the time. In addition to that, combining two capable teams should result in some innovative products being developed further down the line. Belkin also made sure to honor any existing product warranties and customer complaints related to Linksys products. That same year Belkin signed an important deal of sponsoring a professional Dutch road cycling team.

In 2015 Belkin acquired Wemo, a home automation technology vendor, which enriched Belkin’s offering of smart home packages. With products such as smart light switches, electrical plugs, motion detectors etc. being synced up to a dedicated mobile application, Belkin got into this market fully ready.

In 2018 the hardware giant Foxconn, more precisely the Foxconn Interconnect Technology subsidiary acquired Belkin and all of its sister companies, which ended Belkin’s independent legacy of over 35 years. The deal was done at US$866 million, and with this deal Foxconn will find it easier to start manufacturing plants on U.S. soil, more precisely in Wisconsin as planned.

Editor’s note: This is an informative historical article, for any troubleshooting for your Belkin product kindly refer to your model’s Belkin user manual or check out our Belkin modem troubleshooting category.