Philips forays into sound card mkt

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 13 September 2002, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Philips India is planning to step up its presence in the sound card market through OEMs and its channels. Philips sound cards have traditionally been positioned at the high end and have not been launched in the country since the market here is very price sensitive. But now the company has developed some low-end sound cards specifically for the Indian market, which is expected to hit the market by October this year. The company currently has around six-eight IT channels in the country through which it distributes its speakers. The number of distributors is expected to be ramped up in the immediate future with at least one distributor in each state. Philips officials claim that its new range of sound cards are an offer which its partners and channels just cannot afford to miss. While they are priced at the same price points as other vendors, they would produce much superior acoustics. Philips believes that ultimately the quality of its sound cards will increase its marketshare. "We want to talk about features in our sound cards and make people experience the difference in the quality. We do not want to talk about prices," said Hans van't Riet, line of Business Manager from Philips Sound Solutions. Philips officials are confident that with growing awareness and increased education amongst the assemblers it could make substantial foray into that segment of the market as well. And it is important to tap the assembler segment since the bulk of the PC sales take place in that segment. Meanwhile the company is also planning to increase its range of offering in the speaker market. It already has a six percent marketshare in the speaker market, which it launched in April 2001. It started with high-end speakers, which was later expanded to encompass lower end speakers also in September 2001. Recently the company has launched multi-media speakers with microphones to enable voice chats over Internet telephony. Over the next few months, the company is planning another two launches, which would be with woofers. Woofers allow speakers to reproduce sounds in lower frequency so essential in Indian music. Most Indian music like dhol and bhangra are reproduced in the lower frequency. These speakers are expected to be priced in the economy range.

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