Size of China MP3 Market: iRiver made the cut

[coreman]

Got the following from my daily tech update, iRiver is listed near the top of the companies doing MP3 business in China...market exploded last year but I suspect it is the cheaper flash players that are being sold.

China Reported Explosive (130%) Growth in Sales of MP3 Music Players, 1.77 Million Units were Sold in China Last Year

BEIJING, Mar 19, 2004 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Over 1.77 million units of MP3 players were sold in China last year, a leap from 528,000 units in 2002, and the sales also shot up 130 percent to 1.55 billion yuan (187 million US dollars).

Liu Junguo, a senior analyst with CCID Consulting, a domestic research firm releasing the figures, attributed the explosive growth to the increasing number of personal computers and mass music resources on the Internet.

Xiao Gao, a graduating college student in Beijing, has viewed her MP3 player an important part of her life. “I need to rush here and there to attend various kinds of job fairs and I meet a lot of frustrations during job-hunting, but listening to music downloaded from the Internet helps me disperse all the weariness and disappointments,” she said.

The robust demand from customers attracted more and more players to the market. There are more than 100 companies and 300 brands producing the players, Friday’s China Daily reported.

Domestic players, with their aggressive price and marketing strategies, dominated the market with more than 70 percent of the market share.

Three home brands Aigo, Lenovo and MSC topped the market last year, which were closely followed by Samsung Electronics and iRivers from the Republic of Korea (ROK).

Liu predicted the shipments of the digital music-playing devices would continue to grow at the same pace in the next two years. But he warned the skyrocketing growth seen in 2003 may be curbed by a shortage of flash memory cards, which is the main storage format fro MP3 players, and the ensuing price hikes.

The price of the mainstream 128-megabyte flash memory card has risen by 70 percent in the past few months. Though two major suppliers, Samsung of the Republic of Korea ( ROK) and Japan’s Toshiba, decided to expand production capacity, and as Japan’s Hitachi also entered the market, Liu forecast the shortage would last until the end of the year.

[seadzz]

coreman,

you are correct about the pricepoint in China. I have yet to see "white headphones" or iriver anything on the streets. You do see domestic players (china companies) on the young and hip street kid. The vast majority are flash players of 128MB or less designs. 64k are still popular as they tend to be real cheap and considering the locals do not have big money to spend. Another points of note is that FM radio is stinko, bogus CD are cheap and file shareing is a full time past time. I do not see HD players taking off anytime soon as the price point is out of reach AND LYRICS support is lacking on all but iRiver.

To put things in their proper perspective ifp-599 (1GB units) are rarely displayed in retail outlets since there is no market for $500 flash players. The only ifp's on display are the 100 and 300 series with the low price units being the prime movers. iRiver is considered the ultimate highend in mp3 players with the locals buying everything but iRiver due to its high price. Not that iRiver gives a rats butt about retail price points....as long as you have lyric support let them eat cake.

If iRiver is lucky they command 5-10% of the total flash player market in china which considering the total number of domestic units sold is not too big. Total population of China is 1.3 billion and 1.77 million players were sold.....how many of those sales were for export. my guess is the vast majority.

sdz

[Exo]

Originally Posted by seadzz

as long as you have lyric support let them eat cake.

sdz

I was eating when I read this, I nearly spat out my dinner!