Delta Moves into Digital Signage

China Economic News (CENS) reported Friday Delta, manufacturers of power supplies, have moved into the digital signage display market. This is a new market with many competitors trying to establish an edge. Digital displays started becoming more popular a few years ago and currently many hardware companies are looking at them and the high margins they offer. As for Delta, CENS writes:

Since venturing into production of digital signage displays and winning big orders from European and American clients, Delta Electronics Inc., Taiwan`s leading supplier of power supplies, is ambitious to rank among the world`s top-10 suppliers of the new product line in the next three years, according to company sources.

Meanwhile, an influx of orders for power supplies from electronic sectors in upcoming booming seasons is also expected to help Delta score record revenue in July and make the firm`s revenue for the second half of the year surge 40% from the first half to reach NT$69.7 billion.

Since its establishment, Delta has been profitable for 37 consecutive years, with a compound annual growth rate of up to 38.4% in earnings. The firm even reported a high ROE (return of equity) rate of 27.5% last year.

Optimistic about prospects of the market for digital signage displays, Delta has focused its development on the products and launched a series of related solutions incorporating images, video and audio. The firm projects global sales of the products to reach 1 million units this year and to grow to 3 million units in 2011, which will be widely used in public places such as airports, shopping malls, department stores and restaurants in the future. At the moment, the firm provides 42- and 47-inch models, priced at about NT$80,000 (about US$2,581 at US$1: NT$31) and boasting higher gross profits rates among the firm`s existing product lines.

The future for digital signage displays is definitely bright. The market is new and therefore nowhere near saturated and many manufacturers have seized the opportunity to get involved with developing the displays.

The difficulty for the hardware companies is the associated software interface that must come with the display. The software interface is neccessary to enable user to develop presentations and shows to be shown on the display. Unfortunately the hardware companies are not software developers and software development is definitely very different from hardware development so I expect the fairly crude software interfaces I have seen will improve over time.

CENS: Delta to Rank Among World`s Top-10 Suppliers of Digital Signage Displays in Next 3 Years

Can Adlink become Taiwan's Second Biggest IPC Maker

An article on Digitimes suggests Adlink wants to become the second largest Industrial PC (IPC) manufacturer in Taiwan. Since I work for an IPC company myself this article is interesting. The IPC industry is a very unique, niche industry and the current giants, Advantech and Kontron, continue to do well in innovation and ICP Electronics continues to grow with their IEI Technology Brand. Advantech have recently restructured their own organization and continue to lead the field.

From the article it does seem that Adlink are moving into systems as most IPC companies are now. Most IPC companies started out as industrial motherboard manufacturers and have evolved into systems development. Some of the bigger application areas include Medical PCs, Panel PCs, digital signage and point of sales (POS) machines. Most significant IPC companies are moving in that general direction. It will good to see how the competitive IPC environment plays itself out over the coming years.

Digitimes quotes company chairman James Liu as saying:

"The planned large growth in consolidated revenues will come mainly from industrial automation product lines and embedded-computing controllers applied to medical care, transportation and general engineering."

(Original Article: Adlink aims to be second largest Taiwan-based IPC maker)