Word: tvs
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...cobble together parts bought from competitors, Sharp was essentially an assembler, cranking out televisions that were always a little too expensive and too poorly engineered to attract many customers. It was a dispiriting struggle, says Machida: "If you are in electronics manufacturing and you are not strong in TVs, your business and your brand image will suffer...
...Sharp, he knew, had long excelled at developing products featuring liquid crystal displays (LCDs). It released the first mass-market LCD calculator in 1973, developed its first flat-panel LCD television in 1987, and dabbled in LCD televisions throughout the 1990s. Building on this head start, Machida moved LCD TVs to the forefront of Sharp's strategy. He spent heavily over three years on the design, manufacture and marketing of a new flagship TV brand dubbed Aquos?and his bet paid off. Launched in January 2001?a moment referred to inside the company as "the Big Bang"?Aquos quickly became...
...Sharp's technological strengths instead of diversifying into areas where it's doomed to defeat. Taking on Goliaths like LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics across every LCD product line would be suicide, he says. They're dominant, for example, in mass-market LCD panels used in smaller, cheaper TVs and in laptops. Rather than engage them in a murderous price war, Sharp concentrates almost exclusively on ever-larger TVs or on small, high-quality panels found in cell phones, car navigation systems, and hand-held game players like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS. This strategy has enabled Sharp...
...time for the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament. During this sea change, Sharp intends to use Aquos as the product that burnishes its reputation as a top-tier global brand. Already, international business accounts for about half of Sharp's overall revenues, with buoyant sales of its high-end TVs in the U.S. and Europe driving these gains. The company has also benefited abroad from the launch last fall of a worldwide branding campaign, including ads produced by Wieden+Kennedy, an agency that's famous for managing Nike's advertising. Since the spots began airing, brand recognition for Aquos...
...horizon could disrupt LCD's emergence just as easily as LCD has begun to supplant cathode-ray tubes. And even against existing technologies, Sharp faces a formidable battle. Junzo Masuda, director of iSuppli, a market-research firm in Kyoto, says the real test is how Sharp's big-screen TVs ultimately fare against a technology called plasma display panel (PDP), currently the dominant type of large-screen, flat-panel displays. Sharp may have better technology, but Masuda wonders whether it can reduce costs enough to defeat the makers of PDP sets, which are significantly cheaper. "There is a real price...