By Martin Vedris
SYDNEY: Despite speculation in the trade over Sharp Australia clearing out of all air conditioning stock in a large deal last week, the company’s deputy managing director, Denis Kerr, denied that Sharp has pulled out of the air conditioning market in Australia.
An anonymous source contacted Current yesterday, saying that Sharp Australia had sold all existing air conditioning stock to a major Sydney retailer and that it was pulling out of the market.
“That’s totally incorrect,” said Kerr. “It was definitely not sold to any Sydney retailer.
“No-one in Australia has bought all the stock up, at all. What has actually happened is that one of our other subsidiaries in South East Asia has an acute shortage of air conditioning stock.
“They asked us if they could take all of our stock off our hands and as it turns out we have a whole new range coming through in the very near future in the next couple of months and we saw it as an opportunity to clear out all of our old stock and we shipped that out last week.”
Kerr admitted to having a less than ideal sales result over the summer months, and said that the opportunity to clear the stock came as a blessing.
“Other suppliers are stuck with stock they haven’t been able to sell because of the disastrous summer we had yet again in the eastern states. We have no outstanding orders, we had no dealer orders in the system waiting for stock. We had stock consistently right through the Summer, we were never in a stock out situation.
“We saw this as a fantastic opportunity to not just dump product onto the market place but be able to sell it off and prepare ourselves for the new range that’s coming through.”
Kerr said that the new Sharp range will include models from one horsepower through to three horsepower inverter models and that the company is currently preparing submissions to the major retail buying groups for the company’s entire new product range.