Creative says will enter OEM market after good response

Published Mon, Jan 14, 2019 · 12:00 AM
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CREATIVE Technology said on Monday that it is ready to work with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to incorporate its Super X-Fi headphone technology into their products, after getting a good response from some large players at last week's CES tech trade show in the US.

Creative chief executive Sim Wong Hoo had said last year that the plan has always been to sell Super X-Fi to hardware makers in order to reach a larger market, instead of focusing on the rollout of its own products.

The suite of Super X-Fi products that Creative manufactured and showcased at the Las Vegas trade show were meant to demonstrate to OEMs how the new technology could fit in various hardware, as he earlier told The Business Times.

Now, after getting an "overwhelming response" from its OEM partners, Creative is ready to enter the OEM market "immediately", Mr Sim said in a press statement on Monday.

He added: "In fact, many large OEM partners are pushing us to integrate Super X-Fi onto their products as soon as possible. This will be an exciting new phase for us, as the OEM market is potentially hundreds of times larger than the market for Creative's Super X-Fi products."

However, Mr Sim has also noted before that the OEM market requires a whole new level of support and will take a longer time to generate meaningful revenue. Revenue per unit for OEM shipments can also be expected to be lower than from sales of Super X-Fi products directly under the Creative brand. These are factors he has already considered, Mr Sim told BT.

Sprits are high for the Creative team, who managed a surprise awards sweep at CES.

As the trade show wrapped up last Friday after a frantic four days of Super X-Fi demo sessions, Creative's Super X-Fi Headphone Holography snagged a total of 10 awards from various tech review sites. This was the audio tech firm's best awards showing ever, it said.

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