Toshiba enters the portable market. Interestingly enough, article mentions Matsushita also entering market and will not use MP3 format. Hmm, perhaps they will use EPAC? Jeff
quote.bloomberg.com
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Toshiba Plans Return to Audio Market This Year With Internet Music Player
By Gary Schaefer
Toshiba Plans Return to Audio Market With Internet Music Player
Tokyo, July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Toshiba Corp. will start
selling this year a portable device to play music downloaded from
the Internet, marking the electronic company's return to the
audio market amid expectations that online music distribution is
set to boom.
The player will reproduce MP3-format digital music
downloaded by personal computer and saved onto memory cards or
some other form of removable storage media, said a Toshiba
spokesperson who asked not to be identified. It will go on sale
simultaneously in Japan and the U.S.
Toshiba, which phased out its line of audio equipment in
1989 in the face of fierce competition from more specialized
competitors, is betting the development of online music
distribution offers a way back into that market. The company is
forecasting global sales of Internet-compatible players will soar
to 10 million units by 2003 from 1 million this year.
''Toshiba needs to be moving into Internet-related
businesses, and as one means of getting there I think this is a
positive step,'' said Mami Indo, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of
Research Inc. ''Depending on how attractive the price and format
of this new generation of players are to consumers, the global
market may indeed grow as fast as Toshiba is predicting.''
Today's news comes just a month after the world's biggest
record companies and their counterparts in the technology
industry released a preliminary set of security guidelines for
Internet music players. The guidelines call for record companies
to add a digital ''watermark'' to music released on CDs or
online, facilitating detection of copied data.
There are at least 500,000 songs already available for
download on the Internet in the MP3 format. The technology has
been criticized by the music industry for making it easy to copy
and distribute over the Internet compact-disc-quality music
without regard for copyrights or royalties.
The price of Toshiba's player hasn't yet been decided, the
spokesperson said.
Toshiba is the second largest of Japan's three general
electronics manufacturers, whose product range stretches from
televisions to washing machines to elevators. Consumer
electronics accounts for about a fifth of its sales.
The company finished in the red last year for the first time
in 23 years as global prices for computer chips slumped. It's
forecasting a profit of 25 billion yen through March 2000.
The Competition
San Jose, California-based Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc.
began shipping the first commercially available MP3 portable
player, the Rio, last November. Several other companies have
announced plans to develop competing products.
In Japan, Sony Corp. plans to release sometime this year a
version of its world-famous Walkman that features a ''memory
stick'' that plays Internet music saved in a format called
ATRAC3, said spokesman Shigenori Yoshida.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp. wants to get an
Internet music player in stores in time for the year-end shopping
seasons, said a spokesman who asked not to be identified. The
player won't use the MP3 format.
Music sold by direct downloading off the Internet will
achieve $147 million in sales by 2003, according to a forecast
issued last week by London-based Jupiter Communications LLC.
Toshiba's stock rose as much as 4 percent in afternoon
trading, its biggest gain in almost a month.
Shares, which Daiwa's Mami rates ''average,'' got a lift
from news that Toshiba President Taizo Nishimuro told analysts
yesterday that all of the company's divisions except for its
chipmaking business beat earnings projections in the three months
ended in June.
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