Thread: Selling HD In Turbulent Times Q&A

Selling HD In Turbulent Times
Q&A With Hitachi Kokusai Electric America's Sean Moran
by George Winslow -, 11/18/2009 4:06:53 PM

Sean Moran, Hitachi Kokusai Electric America's national sales manager, recently spoke with HD Update contributor George Winslow about the current sales climate for high-definition cameras and the prospects for 2010. An edited transcript follows.



Sean Moran, HitachiMCN: What have been some of the main strategies you've been pursuing to help your clients make the transition to HD with your products

Sean Moran: We have been developing some new, lower-cost cameras to help customers in tough times that we are going through now and probably will continue to face for a year or so.

We've also strengthened our line of accessories and cameras. We have very flexible products to help our customers with their various production applications. We are one of the few manufacturers that offers a high-def dockable camera. It gives our customers flexibility on whether they want to use digital triax, or our optical fiber system.

And we have a couple of co-ventures [that provide even more flexibility]. We have one with Panasonic for a P2 recorder.

Over the last [few] years, we've also made available various space stations, camera control units, etc., at a lower cost, to address the needs of the educational, cable, corporate, government and religious users.

We have always been a leader in box cameras and we'll be coming out with a new box camera at [the National Association of Broadcasters Convention]. We offer very fine products right now but we are at the high-end of that market and we will have a new camera that is still high quality but half the cost of the terms that we offer now.

So those are some of things we are doing to help our customers enter into the field of HD.



MCN: What kind of an impact is the economy having

SM: I would say it has slowed everyone down. Money isn't available like it used to be. It seems like everywhere it is being pushed back and it has definitely impacted business a lot.

But we have maintained a pretty good percentage of business out there. We have kept our quotas the same and sales people are doing very good at getting close to their quotas.

Some of the territories that have been really affected by the recession have been the West Coast and the Midwest. Fortunately, the Northeast and the Southeast are in very good shape.



MCN: What sectors have been stronger than others

SM: We are doing well in education and we are doing a lot [of sales] for video boards and HD cameras at college stadium and professional stadiums.

We have also had some strong cable sales over last six to nine months.

I think what our weakest sector right now is probably broadcast. We have introduced some very good packages, but it seems that some broadcasters -- not all of them, some broadcast groups -- are saving money by doing anything just to put something on the air. That has definitely affected us because we really don't jump into that low-cost HD camcorder businesses.

It seems like the accounting people have more control then engineers. We make very fine product and sometimes quality is overlooked, as opposed to cost.



MCN: You recently cut a deal to provide Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, which is broadcasting the Vancouver 2010 Olympic games, with 39 new Hitachi SK-HD1000 multistandard, multiformat studio/field cameras. How did that come about

SM: We have been very strong in Canada for a long time. We do have an office there which gives us an advantage as well and our relationship with CTV [the lead broadcasters in the consortium] has been very strong over the years. We are offering a fine product. For the value they got, there is nothing that could touch the SK-HD1000.

But we are also giving them a lot of flexibility. They have all this fiber going back and forth between Vancouver and Toronto. For the Olympics, they are going to use the cameras with fiber, but down the road they wanted to plan on using some triax systems and our system gives them that flexibility.



MCN: Any other major deals this year you can discuss

SM: We will soon be announcing several more deals. [But so far this year] we had a large sale to the United Nations, Rutgers University, University of Alabama, University of Delaware.

There was a large sale to Bright House [Networks], a big cable company in Florida that produces high school and local sports in Florida. We also did three of their studios and we did their truck.

We've had many government sales. The U.S. Senate has been integrating our camera systems for the last four or five years and they keep adding to that.

We had a new sales to C-SPAN. They were previously using our standard definition cameras but they're now planning to upgrade to high def in the next two to three years.

We had some PBS sales, KSMQ in Minnesota [for the SK-HD1000 cameras]; KVIE in Sacramento. We've had some sales in with Homeland Security involving high-definition studio cameras.

There are some that I can't talk about but those are ones that come off top of my head. We have also been strong in standard-definition sales, so business hasn't been too bad.

We are lucky because we are not selling monitors and switchers. We basically are just selling camera systems. We have a good reputation and we have been in the industry over 45 years. So we've had a lot of sales.



MCN: How do you see the market developing in 2010

SM: I really don't see the West Coast as strong as we would like it to be but I do see the Midwest coming back a lot stronger. The Northeast and the Southeast will be phenomenal next year for us with our truck business. I see a lot of our current users upgrading to HD. They have already indicated to us that they will be making purchases of HD equipment in the second and third quarter of 2010.

I also think our new, attractive lower-cost HD packages will help our business with core customers and our overall business.
The fact that we are offering some new products, and the fact that these older customers plan to upgrade next year, means that we could have a very good year.