PMP Today

“China consumers bought 478,800 MP4 and other portable media players (PMPs) worth $92.15 million in the first three months of 2007, CCID Consulting Co. Ltd revealed in its latest market analysis report. Some two million sets are expected to fly off the shelves for the whole year, the research group said.”

That’s the word on EETimes Asia, and we once again get to use our great pointy graph going up, up, up. CCID Consulting report also gives us some company positioning and market percentage where Newman takes the lead with 25.3 percent, followed by Aigo, and Changhong Zarva taking the 3rd place with 9.1%. It is definitely good news that we are seeing more of a brand identity developing in Chinese market, where certain companies are taking some serious percentage of total sales in a market flooded with so many similar products.

CCID say that capturing a share of the market is largely attributed to “drastic changes in the brand pattern”, such as manufacturing units with larger screens and newer and better audio and video components. Most of our readers can agree that we are starting to see more and more products that concentrate on quality rather then low BOM, but there is no denying that plenty of recent offerings have nothing new to bring to the table at all.

Check out the full article after the break…

China consumers bought 478,800 MP4 and other portable media players (PMPs) worth $92.15 million in the first three months of 2007, CCID Consulting Co. Ltd revealed in its latest market analysis report. Some two million sets are expected to fly off the shelves for the whole year, the research group said.

The report likewise said improvements in the Newman brand image helped the company top the market share chart, accounting for 25.3 percent of the total sales volume. With almost a 10-percent sales downturn, Aigo dropped to second place, and Changhong Zarva came in third with a 9.1 percent market share.

CCID Consulting said drastic changes in the brand pattern of the MP4/PMP market, more enriched big screen products, and newer and better audio and video entertainment products are characteristics that would speed up product changes and the functional extension of MP4/PMP players.

The research firm also forecasted that video decoding solutions as a technological trend will continue to diversify, with the full replacement of soft decoding by hard decoding greatly improving the competitiveness of MP4 players and PMPs.

Strengthened battery support will weaken the threat from competing mobile phone and other entertainment terminal products, the research group predicted. The development of wide-screen film technology today will also be an important direction for consideration in the design of future MP4/PMP players.

CCID Consulting warned, however, that MP4 players and PMPs need to offer more functions to sustain competitiveness. The group said there is a need to continue tapping the key functions of the gadget, such as video playing, while including richer ones, such as gaming, DC/DV, DVB-T/DMB-TH, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functions.