Vision - January/February 2009 - (Page 47) How do America’s free trade policies affect your business? Houjian: The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an extremely important impetus for Hisense as we continue our globalization drive. We currently have a strong presence in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. We are researching an option to expand our manufacturing presence into Mexico. This year we’ve introduced our products in Mexico with a strong local partner. In Canada we are excited to have launched the Hisense brand through one of the leading retailers in Canada, Canadian Tire. Trade liberalization benefits the consumer and allows a global manufacturer to make inroads in a market by localizing manufacturing. We optimize our allocation of global resources and increase production efficiency, enhancing the buying experience for customers. With agreements such as NAFTA, the world is becoming borderless, stimulating the world’s consumers to purchase the most modern products at a marketdriven, inexpensive price. Due to agreements such as NAFTA, relationships with strong joint-venture partners are extremely critical for success in the marketplace. Hisense has established close trade relationships with North American leaders such While hypercompetitiveness presents challenges to all manufacturers, Panasonic believes that in this environment the most capable brands will survive and thrive. — Panasonic Corp. of North America Chairman and CEO Yoshi Yamada How do you support IPTV growth in nonconsumer settings: schools, government, local institutions, etc.? Houjian: We provide our IPTV systems to schools and local institutions as a public service. Providing an interactive educational training tool for teachers and educators not only benefits the institution, but also works as a positive marketing tool. The student working with a Hisense IPTV system may become a Hisense TV consumer in the future. As we expand our IPTV system, more applications are available to assist educators in motivating their students. The video game craze is sweeping the world. New interactive software allows the educator to train and educate the student using the “student friendly” techniques successfully employed by video game companies. Education doesn’t need to be boring, and with an IPTV system, education truly is fun and rewarding. as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Whirlpool, Canadian Tire, Philco of Mexico and other customers. We have established a major R&D base in North America and continue to research a location for manufacturing in North America. Yamada: Thanks to America’s free trade policies, the U.S. market is the world’s most competitive. This provides great benefits for consumers in terms of the range of electronics they can select from and the prices they pay. While hypercompetitiveness presents challenges to all manufacturers, Panasonic believes that in this environment the most capable brands will survive and thrive. How can manufacturers better work with content and distribution providers to grow IPTV? Houjian: IPTV is an important trend for the TV industry. Hisense fully realized this trend, and we’ve taken solid steps to face the challenge. During the beginning of 2008, we formed a subsidiary, Hisense Media Networks Inc., focusing on IPTV-related technologies, research and development. We acquired experienced IPTV engineers from China and from Silicon Valley. We promptly developed a state-of-the-art IPTV system, called HiTV 1.0 and HiTV 2.0, and began to sign up subscribers. HiTV is an open IPTV operational platform, which supports content providers, service www.ce.org providers and network carriers to provide services to consumers at very low costs. By deploying HiTV, we believe all parties in the IPTV industry chain, including content providers, will find a big stage to play on and the end-user will benefit from a richer experience. Partnerships with local content providers are the key to success. As Hisense is the number one seller of flat-panel TVs in China, we can use our vast marketing techniques to plug in our seven million TV sets shipped yearly with Internet access. This means millions of our TV consumers can get HiTV services immediately with Hisense TV sets brought home, no matter where they live.We believe the consumer is the ultimate winner due to our partnerships. Yamada: Especially with the launch of new entertainment media like Bluray Disc, good cooperation among manufacturers, content owners and distributors is essential for consumer success. This becomes especially important in the key areas of digital cable-ready TVs and in Internetconnected TVs too. • January/February 2009 47 http://www.ce.org
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