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Apex Digital and bargain culture

While not directly PVR/DVR-related, this NY Times Magazine piece on America's "bargain culture" and the mythical $30 Apex DVD player was really compelling.

Based in Ontario, Calif., Apex Digital was founded by two immigrants from China and Taiwan and is a thoroughly global operation: all the DVD assembly is done by subcontracted workers at a factory in Jiangsu, China, where labor costs are low. Apex has only about 100 employees on its payroll, most of them in California.

A big chunk of Apex's 2003 sales (about $1 billion) came during the run-up to Christmas -- when a kind of extreme thriftiness has come to manifest itself in virtual scrums as bargain hunters throng at low-price retailers for while-supplies-last deals. Last Christmas the Deal was often a DVD player marked down to an absurdly cheap $29, and that DVD player was often an Apex model.

It is incredible to think of a company less than 5 years old, with about 100 employees, selling over $1 billion, being second in marketshare to Sony (at least within the category of DVD players.) Apex seems to have converged at a point between the globalization of manufacturing and labor, the distribution of big-box retailers in America, and this "bargain culture," by providing product cheaper than any other competitor. We have had low-cost brands in the past, but Apex seems to be a different beast. They seem to be exploiting every possible advantage in the most efficient manner. It is very impressive.

I think an Apex PVR/DVR offering is still a few years in the future, however when it arrives, it will signal a true mass-market for the PVR/DVR segment.

The Apex DVD Player [nytimes.com]

by Gen Kanai March 6, 2004 in News

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