By James Wells
MELBOURNE: Pebble Electronics, distributors of Konka, Hicon and Conia branded products, is holding its annual sales conference today in Melbourne where it will welcome two new staff members to the company.
The conference, which is being held at the Rosebud Country Club near the Mornington Penninsula, involves 20 staff members including 12 sales staff as well as other senior staff and administration personnel.
Two new employees have joined the sales team, reporting to Pebble Electronics general manager – sales, Nick Fry.
Allan Phu has been appointed account manager for the Queensland and will be responsible for Harvey Norman and The Good Guys. John Yin has been appointed as New South Wales sales manager.
According to Fry, the company enjoyed strong sales in 2006 and is expecting another good result in the 2007 calendar year.
Fry believes that price erosion across the flat panel category in Australian market was less severe than the 40 per cent experienced in the North American market in 2006. However, price drops by the local subsidiaries of major Korean and Japanese brands in the plasma category in particular and less so in the LCD category, were among the most memorable changes to the consumer electronics over the last 12 months.
"There’s no doubt 2006 was a very challenging year in the CE industry. It was a year of vast change as flat-panel TV sales grew enormously as the digital age started to really kick in. But with the market competitiveness so rife, the erosion in pricing was pretty drastic and made things particularly tough.”
“We look back on 2006 as a watershed year for our company as we had to change the way we go to market, we streamlined our customer base and we constantly fine-tuned our product range to cater for the ever-changing needs of our trading partners and the end user.
“The end result, as we look back on the year, is that we achieved excellent growth with all our major trading partners as we successfully altered our marketing strategy to encompass the constant changes and challenges we confronted. These changes included a very successful expansion of our LCD range, across 15 inch, 17 inch, 19 inch, 26 inch, 32 inch and 40 inch screen sizes. We also had continued growth in Plasma TV sales, backed up by our DVD-R and Digital Set-top Box sales. Our white goods result was excellent, particularly in dishwashers."
Fry said his product managers have been extremely busy in the past few months finalising the product range for 2007.
"We look forward to the introduction of both SD and HD integrated LCD and Plasma panels, continued success in our digital products category, new white goods products and just generally to have another year of strong sales and further strengthening our relationship with our valued customers. 2007 will, no doubt, be another challenging year but we’re confident of a strong result and look forward to the challenges ahead."
Conia, Konka, Hicon and Hyundai products can be purchased at The Good Guys, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, Clive Peeters, JB Hi-Fi, Betta Electrical stores and Retravision.