Home › content

D&M Holdings to Shutter MP3 Player Maker Rio Audio

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on August 26, 2005 - 6:39am.
Tokyo -- Japanese consumer electronics firm D&M Holdings, whose brands include Denon, Marantz, ReplayTV and Rio, announced on Friday that it plans to exit the portable MP3 player market with the closure of its struggling Rio Audio business. The company agreed in July to sell the money-losing Rio's technology assets for $7 million, to chipmaker SigmaTel. D&M said it decided to close Rio, which it purchased in 2003, because "the mass-market portable digital audio player market was not a strong enough strategic fit with the company's core and profitable premium consumer electronics brands to warrant additional investment in the category," the company said in a statement, also citing "the costs required to effectively scale and compete in this sector, where competition has grown intense." The company expects to realize a loss of $25 million in shut-down related costs for the global Rio operations during its fiscal second quarter, in addition to a $22 million loss from discontinued operations at its U.S. Rio unit. "The digital audio market is evolving in such a way that our competitive advantage will be to focus on creating premium home network products that are designed for compatibility with a variety of client devices and services," said D&M Holdings president Vic Pacor.
http://www.dm-holdings.com/eng/media/press/2005/20050826.html 
http://tinyurl.com/852rx
http://www.rioaudio.com
tags: Music | D&M Holdings | MP3 Player Maker | Rio Audio |



Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.