“Singapore’s Creative Technology Ltd. intends to maintain its business focus, even as it faces increasing competition in the MP3 player segment from industry giant Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL), a senior company official said Friday,” Dow Jones reports. “Creative will ‘stay focused’ on its business and intends to ‘fight this war we are facing now,’ Chief Executive Sim Wong Hoo said at an industry conference, adding that he is ‘optimistic’ the company will survive the ‘MP3 war.'”
“‘If you can survive … you will one day hit the jackpot,’ he said, without elaborating,” Dow Jones reports. “The company’s shares Friday closed 0.9% lower at S$11. It has fallen by about 55% so far this year… The Singapore company’s MP3 players, sold under the MuVo and Zen brands, are a distant No. 2 to Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod players. Creative is currently facing considerable pressure on prices. A spate of price cuts by Apple prompted Creative to reduce the price of its five-gigabyte Zen Micro MP3 player to S$398 from S$448 last year. Late last year, armed with a US$100-million advertising budget, Creative seemed reasonably optimistic it could duplicate Apple’s success in the digital music player market, even though few analysts at the time shared that optimism.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sim Wong Hoo is the best. In six short months, he’s gone from declaring “war” and vowing to capture 40% market share to being “optimistic” his company will “survive” his self-declared “war.” Sheesh.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Beleaguered Creative may have to write off unsold stock as losses loom – June 28, 2005
Creative Tech’s reduced outlook drags on Apple, PortalPlayer, SigmaTel – June 27, 2005
Creative Tech cuts sales outlook, drags Apple down in early trading – June 27, 2005
Apple passed 20 million iPods sold milestone in early June – June 24, 2005
Creative Technology shares slide to lowest mark in almost two years – May 18, 2005
Apple squeezes and Creative’s profit plunges 72-percent – April 23, 2005
Apple iPod pressure forces Creative to drop prices on music players – March 01, 2005
Creative’s self-declared ‘MP3 player war’ against Apple isn’t going very well – January 20, 2005
Creative CEO: Apple iPod shuffle ‘a big let-down, worse than the cheapest Chinese player’ – January 12, 2005
Creative declares ‘war’ on Apple iPod, shoots for 40% market share of MP3 players – December 21, 2004
Creative Technology declares ‘MP3 War’ against market-dominating Apple iPod – November 17, 2004
Mossberg: Dell, Rio, Creative ‘iPod mini killers’ lag badly behind Apple iPod mini – October 27, 2004
Creative pushes to become ‘Pepsi’ to Apple’s ‘Coke’ in digital music player market – August 07, 2004
Steve seems to be copying Mike Dell for a change.
———-
Uh, it’s not a huge surprise is it? They’re making money hand over fist and have like 6 billion in the bank.. most of the music player companies they’re competing against have nothing close to that in the bank.
Sony? They’re still recovering from their greedy ATRAC madness..
Dell? They’ve got money, sure, but they hardly even market their little Dell DJ, and probably don’t even care, since they’re not pushing software like Apple is. They’re stuck on Musicmatch, with Creative making their players for them…I really don’t think they care about the mp3 arena.
Gates is hoping he can win against superior hardware… again..
I seriously doubt that they could possibly survive.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119213,00.asp
How has Apple, the little 2% player, near it’s death for the last 20 years, suddenly become an industry giant?
What a farce!
Regarding the Slatterly monopoly suit: I can imagine that FairPlay is less of a hardware lock-out and more of an insurance policy (implemented through technology) for the record companies as a way for Apple to keep the use of a single downloaded song somewhat limited (based on the number of computers and music players one person would reasonably own). I’m sure that’s how this will play out in court, if it comes to that.
This Slatterly fellow owns an iPod and has purchased files from the ITunes Music Store, therefor he has suffered no damages. He is likely a tool for M$, Real, Creative, or some other greed-monger that was once writing Apple’s obituary but now wants a chunk of it cash.
The suit against Apple is predicated on the fact that iTMS purchased tunes are protected by Apple’s DRM and that the FairPlay protection will not allow the purchaser to play the tunes on non iPod music players, Motorola Phones notwithstanding.
I think these idiots have the cart before the horse. In most cases, you choose an MP3 player, any MP3 player, and you get free MP3 management software with it. iTunes works with iPods and damn few other players. You use the software that came with your player to download purchased, DRM’ed ‘MP3’s’. They work with your player. Most people in this proposed class action fall into this situation.
If you chose to get the iTunes software to manage your ‘MP3’s’ before you bought an ‘MP3’ player you had many other different software choices on Windows OS (80% of iPod users). If you then bought DRM’ed music from iTMS and then bought an incompatible player, whose fault is that? You knew the DRM only worked with iPod players when you bought it. You could have bought an iPod or used other software to buy other DRM’ed music that worked on other players.
If you used to own an iPod and you have iTMS DRM’ed music in your collection and you now want to buy a competitive player then you can’t do it without switching ‘MP3’ player management software. Is it the new player that is at fault? Is it the new ‘MP3’ management software that is at fault? Doesn’t the iTMS purchaser know at the time of purchase that the tunes only work on iPods? Everyone knows these DRM’ed tunes can be burned to CD and ripped into any DRM free format needed.
Where is the class needed to form this class action suit? How many people fall into this idiot’s category? This is obviously a money grab by many ‘Outstanding’ members of the legal profession. It has no merit whatsoever. Just compare it to the iPod battery class action suit for merit. There is no comparison.