Strategy in TECH...
Multiple news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Reuters News Service, are reporting that Best Buy founder Richard M. “Dick” Schulze is considering abandoning his bid to take the company private. Schulze had informed the Board of Directors in August 2012 that he intended to purchase all outstanding shares of stock to take the company private. After months of study and planning, Schulze is said to be ready to scuttle the plan.
Marketers are going ga-ga over marketing to users via their smartphones. Still a relatively new phenomenon, many marketing organizations are devoting an increasing amount of their budget to developing ads and promotions to be delivered mobilely [OK, I made that word up, but you know what I mean] to users of smartphones.
But new research from AOL called “Seven Shades of Mobile” and reported on by the Harvard Business Review, shows that most of them are getting it wrong…all wrong!
In what is turning out to be a very rough earnings season in Japan, Pioneer Corp. announced yesterday its results for the third quarter and nine-month periods of fiscal year 2013 which ends March 31, 2013. Both Q3 and the 9-month periods showed losses, with the YTD loses increasing substantially to ¥9.8 billion ($105 million) down from a loss of ¥6.6 billion. As a result of this, the company has cut its FY2013 forecast from a profit of a ¥1 billion ($11 million) to a loss of ¥4 billion ($42.8 million)…a surprising ¥5 billion change of fortune.
Due to the company’s deteriorating business, the Board of Directors has ordered a significant restructuring including salary and bonus cuts for executives and employees. The company has also said it will cut jobs.
Yamaha Corporation announced yesterday in Japan that its Board of Directors has ordered a major restructuring of the company’s domestic operations – in one case merging eight separate operating subsidiaries into one. The company has also released results for FY2013 through the third quarter ending December 31, 2012 and revised its annual forecast downward from a profit to break-even as a result of extraordinary charges related to the restructuring as well as sales and profit declines.
ProSource, which bills itself as the country’s largest specialty and consumer-electronics merchandising group, announced today that IC Realtime would become a vendor for the organization at their upcoming HES Summit taking place February 17-20, 2013 at the Orlando Marriott World Center.
Start-up Ube, the new company founded by former CEDIA CEO Utz Baldwin and partners, offers an all-new mobile device-optimized, cloud-based home control technology bringing new power – and new simplicity – to the masses. This new technology could be a highly disruptive game changer with a re-conceived business model that just might gut the heart of the highly lucrative residential systems installer market. Or not…
Today, Ube [pronounced YOU-bee] announced their first major step forward in the wake of their stunning technology show win at last fall’s DEMO 2012 in which the company received the People’s Choice Award earning them $1 million in media from the show’s promoter. Ube has begun a campaign on the crowdfunding website Indiegogo to raise funds so that the company can manufacturer their first 10,000 Wi-Fi smart dimmers. The company also announced a BETA test program open to residential A/V electronics installers and integrators.
Since this is a blog dedicated to marketing strategy, we would be remiss if we failed to comment on last week’s Super Bowl – which has become almost as important to advertisers as it is to the NFL. With advertisers spending an average of $4.0 million for a 30-second spot this year (oh yeah that’s an average, some paid more), you would expect we would see that best that marketers could muster. And, for the most part, you’d be right.
Industry veteran Bob Brown, known to many from his long tenure as President at Lenbrook America, has joined Thiel Audio as a member of their board of directors. Brown will also, effective immediately, begin serving as the company’s interim Chief Operating Officer (COO).
Thiel, as we recently reported, is in the middle of an exciting revival as the result of its recent purchase by a consortium of Tennessee investors led by current CEO Bill Thomas.
Trapped by their own newly strengthened mandated pricing programs, and a commitment to grow sales profitably, Sony Corp. has resorted to deploying a wave of 400 company employees into the field to sell Sony televisions at U.S. retailers. The move is said to be a way to try to stimulate Sony TV sales without resorting to retail discounting.
Every year, 6,000 large, expensive, and depleted batteries, recycled by auto dealers all over the country, pour into Toyota Motor Corp. in Japan. The batteries have been pulled out of Prius automobiles as they are replaced by car dealers who then return them to the manufacturer for recycling. And given the growing popularity of the Prius, this rate will almost certainly continue to rise over time.
What to do with them? Toyota has ingeniously figured out a way to refurbish them, reconfigure them, and resell them back to the very dealers who had returned them. How do they do this?
