Research and development has been the heart and soul of Leadtek corporate policy and vision from the start. Credence to this is born out in the fact that annually 30% of the employees are engaged in, and 5% of the revenue is invested in, R&D. Furthermore, the effort Leadtek has put into reinforcing copyright protection and a well-established copyright management system has reaped a just reward.

In 1998 the Corporate IPR Management System Award sent to Leadtek. In 1994 Leadtek cooperated with the Ministry of Economy in the Leading Product Development to develop a true color 3D graphics card. And in 1997 the company involved itself in the 3D/VR PC Technology Project and Advanced Graphics technologies.

In 1996, to establish an efficient quality control system, Leadtek restructured the company to meet ISO9001 standards and was certified in October the same year – thus ensuring the quality of Leadtek products.

And to further strengthen our foundation we strove to build and grow beyond our accomplishments. We realized that to effectively achieve this Leadtek would have to go public. It goes without saying that a well managed financial and accounting system is the lifeblood of any public company. Moreover, the public also needs to be kept well informed of how the company operates. Leadtek set its sight on these goals in 1997 and officially went public in June 1999.

By doing so, Leadtek became the first public listed graphics card manufacturer in Taiwan. Meanwhile, our products go from strength to strength and world acclaim comes pouring in. Our sales network grows apace and has already traversed national frontiers to penetrate new markets on five continents.

Our ODM and OEM products are much sought after by leading multinationals, matching the international quality criteria and standards of market leaders such as Philips, NTT DoCoMo, etc.

Over the years, by continuing strengthening its partnership with graphics chip venders, Leadtek has been able to launch its new 3D graphics products one step ahead of its competitors; each model was the first of its kind to be found on the shelves..

A GPS module for automobile navigation developed in 1998 has successfully opened a new arena for Leadtek. In 2001, the take over of Navitel Technology, a company dedicating in developing GPS technologies, has shown Leadtek's determination in succeeding in the GPS space. In four years, the GPS line has churned out products for applications with hand-held devices, and in health care, fleet management, asset tracking, etc. By 2003, as SiRF's most important partner, Leadtek has taken a big proportion of the European and US market and was already the second largest manufacturer of GPS products from Taiwan.

The take over of the videophone sector of Truedox Technology Corporation in March 2001 erected the milestone for Leadtek's expansion and transformation into a provider of total multimedia communications solutions. Truedox's achievement in video telephony had won our confidence and strengthened our forces for taking on the global market. Hanging on to the commitment of always offering the best for our customers, the quality and functionality of Leadtek's videophone units and videophone set top boxes have never been matched. The transformation was successfully done without compromising Leadtek's roles in the 3D graphics, multimedia and GPS markets.

Undaunted by limitless limits of the technological revolution Leadtek's communications R & D team came up with the world's first CEO class desktop ISDN video conferencing system in 1998. A portable, affordable plug and play, professional video conferencing system, TeleEye ISDN quickly won market share with its solid reputation for quality and stability. During the past two years, Leadtek communications products, feature rich, state of the art technology, have continued to win the accolades of the critics and users alike, carving out a unique position in this competitive market.

The massive computing power required for Windows graphics applications have spurred on the global demand for Windows graphics accelerators. With its first made-in-Taiwan 3D graphics accelerator, WinFast 3D GD400, Leadtek announced the beginning of a new era. Up until this time the graphics environment was based on 2D graphics cards. Leadtek graphics products, with their outstanding features and performance, not to mention cutting-edge technology are a force to be reckoned with on the international market.

Now that Leadtek had scooped almost every award and more than won its spurs in the Asia-Pacific region with its WinFast 3D series, it was setting its focus on the multimedia and communications markets. And our dream of taking the world lead in high-end workstation platforms and integrated multimedia motherboards for professional CAD/CAM and 3D/VR applications was also within our reach.

At the same time the company assumed a new role in the multimedia arena -as an exponent of image processing systems. For which it has accumulated, over the years, an avalanche of awards. The WinFast series had, within a very short space of timer established for Leadtek a corporate image that had become synonymous with excellence, innovative designs, barrier-shattering technologies and competitiveness. But ergonomics and functional sophistication had not been left behind. Halfway through the decade a range of Leadtek products, such as Video Plus, the video/still image capture card, VmatePro, a video converter, TV Plus 300, a multi-purpose TV card and Smart TV, a standalone TV box, had been launched with great success.

Integrating video and communications technologies, Leadtek released its first video conferencing product in 1996. Known as TeleEye, this branded product has claimed a niche that is all its own in the global market. TeleEye324 for instance was the first videophone to use a regular phone line and a TV/computer screen.