The Guillemot Brothers Sell You the Ferrari Wheel and the DJ Deck
Five brothers from a Brittany village of a few thousand people built the joystick empire behind Microsoft Flight Simulator and the decks that teach the world to DJ. The famous siblings run Ubisoft. This is what the quieter ones do.
Say the name Guillemot to most gamers and you get a blank look. Say Thrustmaster, and the sim-racer in the room describes their force-feedback wheel. Say Hercules, and the bedroom DJ points at the controller they learned on. Almost nobody connects the three. They are, in fact, the same company - a French hardware maker founded in 1984 by five brothers in the Brittany town of Carentoir, a place of only a few thousand people. The louder half of that family went on to run Ubisoft and Gameloft. The quieter half stayed with the boxes you plug in.
Guillemot Corporation designs and manufactures interactive entertainment hardware - the accessories, not the games. It is publicly listed on Euronext Paris, employs roughly 320 people across about eleven countries, and distributes to more than 150. In 2024 it reported revenue of 125.1 million euros. It is not a startup, not a unicorn, and not remotely fashionable. It is a four-decade compounding machine built on a simple bet: whatever platform wins, people still need something to hold.
01Two brands, aimed in opposite directions
The clever thing about Guillemot is not any single product. It is the split. The company runs two consumer brands that point at almost opposite customers, and it lets each one be fully itself.
Thrustmaster
Premium gaming accessories: sim-racing wheels and pedals, flight-sim joystick-and-throttle systems, and controllers for PC, PlayStation and Xbox. This is the enthusiast end - people who spend hundreds on a rig.
Wheels · HOTAS · gamepadsHercules
Affordable digital-audio gear: entry-level DJ controllers, monitor speakers, headphones and starter kits, most bundled with mixing software. This is the on-ramp - the first deck a beginner ever touches.
DJ controllers · speakers · DJUCEDA third piece, DJUCED, is the in-house DJ software that ships with Hercules hardware. It turns a one-time controller sale into a longer relationship: the beginner learns on your software, and the software makes your hardware feel obvious to buy. The whole Hercules pitch is that a total novice can mix a track within minutes. That is a design goal, not a marketing line.
Guillemot doesn't make the game. It makes the thing you grip while you play it - and that thing tends to outlive the game.
The peripheral bet, in one sentence
02The family that spun out an industry
The origin story is almost too neat. In 1984, five brothers - Claude, Christian, Yves, Michel and Gerard Guillemot - opened a computer shop near home in Brittany. They moved fast into mail-order and wholesale, and by their second year were supplying computers to much of the French school system. Getting there early gave them a head start that never really went away.
Then the family tree branched. In 1986 the brothers founded what became Ubisoft, now one of the largest video-game publishers in the world. In 2000 they founded Gameloft, a major force in mobile games. Guillemot Corporation - the hardware business - stayed separate, went public in 1998, and in 1999 made the two acquisitions that define it today: Thrustmaster, the pioneer of PC gaming joysticks, and Hercules, an audio and video hardware maker. One family, three companies, three different layers of the same industry.
Three empires from one kitchen table: the games (Ubisoft), the mobile games (Gameloft), and the hardware you play them on (Guillemot).
The Guillemot family map03What you can actually do with it
The Thrustmaster range is built around depth of realism. At the top sits direct-drive technology - the T818 base delivers force feedback straight from the motor with no belts or gears in between, the same approach used in serious sim rigs. Below it, wheels like the T248 bring force feedback to a mainstream price. The rims are where the licensing shows: official, life-size replicas of Ferrari steering wheels, down to the paddle shifters.
On the flight side, the same authenticity logic applies. The HOTAS Warthog is modeled on real U.S. Air Force A-10 controls under official license, while the lighter T.Flight and Sol-R ranges make the hobby approachable. This is why a software launch matters so much to Guillemot: when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrived, a new wave of players suddenly wanted a stick and throttle, and Thrustmaster was there to sell it. Its sales rose 8% that year.
Hercules aims at the opposite feeling - not intimidation, but confidence. The DJControl Inpulse line uses light guides that show a beginner how to beatmatch by eye; the motorized Inpulse T7 adds real spinning platters for the feel of vinyl; the pocket-sized Starlight strips it down to the essentials. Pair any of them with the bundled software and monitor speakers, and the barrier to trying to DJ collapses to about the price of a game console.
04The business behind the boxes
Hardware is a famously unforgiving business - thin margins, brutal inventory risk, platform cycles you do not control. Guillemot's 2024 results suggest a company that has learned to live inside those constraints. Revenue rose 5% to 125.1 million euros. More striking, net operating income jumped 48% to 3.7 million euros, on research and development spending held flat at about 8.9 million euros. In plain terms: they got more out of the business without starving the part that invents the next product.
Consolidated revenue
Euros, approximate · source: company reporting
The margin picture is the quiet headline. Guillemot has held gross margin around 53% - unusual for consumer electronics - and finished 2024 in a net cash position rather than carrying debt. Two brands help here too: when Hercules softens, as it did in 2024 with a 15% revenue dip, a strong Thrustmaster year can carry the group. Diversification is not a slogan for a company this size; it is a shock absorber.
A 53% gross margin on gaming peripherals, from a 320-person company in rural Brittany. Boring, until you look twice.
Reading the 2024 numbers05How it stands apart
Guillemot competes in two crowded rooms. In sim-racing and flight-sim gear it faces Logitech G, Fanatec, MOZA Racing and Honeycomb. In DJ controllers it faces Pioneer DJ, Numark and Native Instruments' Traktor. It is rarely the biggest name in either room. What it has instead is range and independence: a product ladder that runs from a first joystick to a direct-drive rig, from a pocket DJ deck to a motorized controller, all under one roof, with its own software and its own licensing deals.
The licensing is the moat that is easy to underrate. Ferrari steering wheels and U.S. Air Force joysticks are not things a competitor can simply copy - they are permissions, and permissions are exclusive. Authenticity, in this market, is a product feature you can lock up.
06The through line
From a shop selling computers to French schoolchildren to a listed group shipping to 150 countries, the constant has been the accessory. Platforms rose and fell - the PC, the consoles, the streaming era, the flight sims, the DJ apps - and through all of it the wheel, the stick and the deck kept their place. Guillemot's bet in the 1980s was that the thing in your hands would outlast the thing on your screen. Forty years on, still family-run and still in Brittany, the company is a working argument that it was right.