Rise above the recession
22 July 2008
No-one can avoid the dreaded R word, but there are some companies producing recession-busting electronics design that rise above the global slump.
There are plenty of signs of a slow-down, I’d be a fool to say otherwise, it is in daily news reports Even Gordon Brown is telling us to tighten our belts and prepare for a bumpy ride (although it isn’t his fault of course, “its a global slow-down”, although as chancellor he put in some of the measures that are hitting the UK hardest this time round).
There are plenty of sorry examples of the downturn/slump/recession but there is some hope. Call me Pollyanna, always looking on the bright side, but there are companies, electronics ones, that see a way to encourage hard-pressed shoppers to part with their hard-earned cash.
In hard times, what do people do but stay home and watch a DVD? And this requires a Blu-ray player. Now that the battle of the formats has been won by Blu-ray, the way is clear, consumers who had been holding back can buy with abandon now. Sales are already booming and set to rise over the next four years. Now the industry is looking to enhance the wining Blu-ray technology. Cue Pioneer. The Japanese manufacturer revealed its 16-layer Blu-ray player at this week’s International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage in Hawaii, which increases capacity to 400GByte. The company has got around the crosstalk that plagues other players with multiple layers models. Without crosstalk, the signal can be stable and 16 times the storage of conventional disks. Pioneer uses a wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element in the Blu-ray player that can read weak signals at a high signal to noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism to eliminate crosstalk that can plague other players, which are limited to 25GByte storage per layer.
Last week, NEC, who commands 60 per cent of the Blu-ray drive market, announced it expects to double Blu-ray sales in the next two years.
If you are not saving money by sitting indoors, there seems to always be money for the right product. Last Friday, the new 3G iPhone went on sale in the UK, although it had been for sale online and sold out. At one point, supplier O2 said there were 13,000 enquiries a second online, which is 10 times more than last year when the ‘old’ iPhone was launched. After the frenzy of the weekend, the company reported it had sold a million phones in the first weekend.
As with Pioneer’s Blu-ray player design, the iPhone ups the ante with the capability to access faster networks, has a GPS location chip and support for Microsoft Outlook as well as the desirable iPod and web browser functions. No wonder Apple’s shares went up two per cent when it was launched.
Keeping with music, MP3 downloads are increased. Companies like 7digital, the UK’s number two behind iTunes, have introduced DRM (digital rights management)-free formats and reported an increase in sales. The argument is that although the iPod is clearly king, songs can be bought from places other than iTunes. The company, not unnaturally, insists that MP3 files are superior in quality to iTunes and that the ability to offer more sources is good for sales and good for the consumer.
When the world is battening down the hatches, people retreat indoors and watch TV. Take the American model, figures released this month reinforce the stereotype of Americans sat in front of the TV with the average American reported to have watched 127 hours of TV in May this year, an increase on the hours watched last May. They watched 26 hours of TV on the net too, up two hours from May 2007. So that’s looking good for HD TV manufacturers which will also shift more as the analogue-switchoff sweeps across Europe and North America over the next four years.
The younger consumers are turning to watch mobile TV, in North America 4.4million subscribe to mobile video on phones today, which is a small percentage but a growing one. The younger generation are taking new technologies and making them their own, which will model future markets. At the moment two to 11 year olds use the internet less than other age groups but they spend a third of their time watching videos on the net. This behaviour will shape the future of delivering messages to this age group as they grow older and have money to spend.
It turns out the generation most concerned with green issues, is the 35year old and over group. It is they who are spurning, or reducing use of, their cars, installing energy-saving lightbulbs at home and at work and are devout recyclers. So, the rise of photovoltaic solar cells is no surprise. PV cells are set to reach semiconductor manufacturing levels by 2010 with 400 production lines worldwide producing at least 1MW of PV cells, or four times 2007’s level of output. The market is predicted to grow 40 per cent each year until 2010 and 20 per cent a year beyond that. Production costs are expected to continue to fall and the ultimate thanks, price parity with electricity, is due as early as 2012 in some countries.
I can’t offer much in the way of recession beating tips: spend your way out of it is one popular stance but then it is difficult to spend money you haven’t got. To entice anyone to part with money, it has to be a value proposition whatever the economic climate. For the foreseeable future, the smart money will look to giving the public what they want, creating must-have, reliable electronics with enviable design lines.
Who do you think will come out the other side?
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