Now for those wondering why it took the company this long to expand to more countries, Lionel Paillet, Nest’s GM for Europe said that they were trying to bring scale to the business. Speaking to TechCrunch in an interview, Paillet said, “The main reason for waiting to launch is that we’ve been busy to bring scale to business.”
He adds, “Contrary to some launching everything everywhere and hoping for the best, we had a specific strategy. Several years into our UK and Netherlands businesses, for example, we’ve been selling extremely well and are now in millions of homes globally, growing 50% year-on-year. The smart home is still a new concept, and we really wanted to get that base before going to our next countries.”
Based on this it sounds like it could take a while before Nest expands further to other markets, such as Asia. However we guess the good news is that the expansion has begun so it’s only a matter of time. In the meantime, Nest has announced that customers in the new markets they’re expanding to can already pre-order their products with availability set for the 15th of February, 2017.