SanDisk quietly becomes distant No. 2 to Apple in U.S. digital music player sales
Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 12:32 AM EST"One does not usually think of flash-memory card maker SanDisk as a leader in fashion technology. But the Sunnyvale-based company has quietly become the No. 2 seller in the United States of the hottest tech trend -- digital music players," John Boudreau reports for The San Jose Mercury News. "SanDisk won't be rolling out big TV campaigns featuring silhouetted dancers. And the company's digital music players, while sleek, have yet to inspire breathless prose from reviewers. 'We want to be a strong No. 2 in the MP3 space,' said Eric Bone, SanDisk's director of consumer product marketing."
"SanDisk, a leader in the market of USB flash drives -- those little storage devices small enough to hook onto your key chain -- and flash memory cards, has a strong presence in retailers across the country," Boudreau reports. "The company reported a record $2.3 billion in revenues for 2005, and sold a million digital music players during the recent holiday quarter. Apple, on the other hand, registered a whopping 14 million iPod sales during the holiday period. Still, SanDisk's sales were an impressive showing for the company, which entered the digital music player market in November 2004. 'We already have the channels. We have the brand,'' SanDisk Chief Executive Eli Harari said. 'We are not Apple. We are not an iPod. But we have a highly respected brand.'"
SanDisk's strategy is to offer digital music devices to those 'beyond the middle class,' Harari said. 'Our passion is to bring the cost of these devices down. It's basically about creating new markets in which people can afford a product.' SanDisk's current Sansa music players range in price from $79 to $149 with a disk capacity from 256 megabytes to 2 gigabytes, though promotions can cut the price of its most basic model to as low as $40. Apple announced Tuesday a new 1 GB iPod nano that will cost $149, and said it is lowering the price of its iPod shuffle to $69 for the 512-megabyte model and $99 for the 1 GB version," Boudreau reports. "Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, thinks being a solid No. 2 in the digital music player business will be hard to sustain. 'Apple walloped everybody last quarter,' Wu said. And the new, lower priced iPods, 'will make life harder for non-Apple vendors. If I were the competitors, I would be worried.' SanDisk is realistic: It knows that, at least for now, the digital music world sways to Apple's beat. 'There are people who, no matter what, will buy an iPod,' Bone said. 'All I want is for people to think there is an alternative.'"
Full article here.
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Yawn!