Leaner and meaner
Back in February of this year we brought you the news that display maker Viewsonic had been reduced to skeleton staff in Europe. With operations being run mainly out of Taiwan at the time, we feared Viewsonic may be pulling out of Europe altogether.
We can now report that this doesn't seem to be the case, having spoken exclusively to Viewsonic UK reseller channel manager Richard Allenby. He started by giving us his view on what has been happening at Viewsonic over the past year or so.
"We were hit by the perfect storm involving exchange rates, panel prices and the global economy. Our average invoice value almost halved," said Allenby. "We now have a leaner and more reactive company structure, with less middle management, focused on six regional centres in Europe, and with the UK also backing-up the rest of Europe."
Allenby maintains that Viewsonic remains a strong brand and still has solid relationships within the European channel. "People are happy to buy Viewsonic; the quality is good and we have been first with many technologies," he said. "We expect our NVIDIA 3D Vision compatible VX2268wm to arrive in the UK channel in mid to late August."
While displays remain very much Viewsonic's area of strength, it seems to be betting its future on diversifying into the computing space, primarily by combining its displays with Intel's Atom CPU. "Diversification is very important," said Allenby. "Currently 80-85 percent of our business is TFTs, that needs to move to more like 50 percent. Visual experience is our core competence."