Iriver Company

Company Profile

In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, located in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, CA, while keeping R&D in-house.

Their first iriver product was the iMP-100, a portable CD player capable of decoding MP3 data files on CDs, released in November, 2000. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SonicBlue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. Iriver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world, before jumping to other types of players. The company rose to the No. 1 position in the global market, before being displaced by the iPod's introduction.

In 2002, iriver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. Best Buy chain. A year later, it was first to market with 512MB and 1GB players and completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. By this time, the company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products.

iriver adopted a new marketing strategy in 2005, attempting to grab mindshare from Apple. It referred to the U10 flash player as the thumb thing. This referred to users controlling their MP3 devices with their thumbs, just as they do their cell phones and text messaging devices.

iriver's U.S. unit, based in Vancouver, WA, held 3.4 percent of the U.S. MP3 player market in 2005, according to IDC. The company targets early adopters among American users as it tries to regain dominance of the category. It also opened sales divisions in Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan.

In its South Korean home market, iriver accounts for 50 percent of sales and the company has bought ads claiming its products are a symbol of patriotism. It also operates a small chain of iriver Zone stores, with locations in China, Japan and Korea. The Incheon International Airport shop features a large heart-shaped art piece, which represents the corporate "Heartbeat Philosophy" of "dedication to its customers."

Products

iriver's current products can play MP3, WMA, and WAV audio files. Some units can also play Ogg Vorbis audio files, though some newer units do not have this feature. Some units support viewing of text, Macromedia Flash, or BMP files. The company also supports Microsoft PlaysForSure, which allows recent products to support subscription-based music download services, including URGE, Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited. It also lets users disable its DRM functionality.

Many players supports multilingual display in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. They support Winamp playlists and allow repeat, shuffle play, and programmable functions. Several preset and one user-defined EQ settings are included, plus a built-in FM tuner.

Most iriver players include a unique feature called study mode. Users can quickly jump back and forth within tracks by a certain time interval, set from three to 180 seconds in current models. The option was designed to help people listening to recorded language lessons. SonicBlue removed this feature from its Rio Volt models, causing some users to hack their players with iriver firmware from other regions.

Copyright 2008 - France BtoB from Wikipédia