Electronic gadgets still a sure hit with consumers
Something worth watching: TV sets remain the No. 1 electronics product in Poland.
Consumer electronic equipment sales in Poland last year totaled $991 million, a 2% drop from the previous year, according to the latest report from the Electronic Market Institute (IRE) (http://www.ire.pl/english/), a Warsaw-based consultancy and market analysis firm.
"For the Polish market, it is quite a good result," said Grzegorz Chlewacz, director of the consumer and IT sectors at IRE, adding that the slight decrease from the previous year was due to exchange-rate calculations from the zloty to the dollar and a small decline of gross retail prices for products.
Fierce competition in Poland's consumer electronics sector, as elsewhere in Europe, has forced a price war among companies vying to sell their gadgets to tech-hungry Poles, especially among foreign players, including Philips (http://www.philips.pl) of the Netherlands, Germany's Grundig (http://www.grundig.pl), and Japan's Panasonic (http://www.panasonic.com.pl), which have dominated Poland since the mid-1990s.
"On the one hand, you can't find a significant domestic player because foreign companies invested here, and some of their production is based in Polish factories," said Andrzej Slodki, the spokesman of Panasonic Polska, which set up sales operations in Warsaw in 1993. "There's no domestic competition for Japanese companies and Philips."
With a plethora of new handheld computer gadgets and digital equipment, it's not surprising that sales of the simple yet indispensable boob tube continued to decline in 2002. Last year, sales of TV sets in Poland comprised 45% of total consumer electronic goods sales versus audio equipment with 40% and video equipment with 15%, according to IRE's report.
Yet, in 2000, TV sets remained the biggest product segment of the consumer electronics market as in past years with about 6.5 million sets manufactured in Poland, according to the IRE. Imports accounted for 60% of all TVs sold here last year, while domestic producers held the remaining 40% of the market. About 90% of all TVs manufactured in Poland were exported, according to Chlewacz.
And that's good news for firms like LG Electronics (http://www.lge.pl). The Korean-owned company established a TV-production facility in Mlawa, about 120 kilometers north of Warsaw, in 1999. The factory produces about 100,000 units per month, said Tomasz Fabinski, the product manager of brand goods at LG Electronics' Warsaw sales office. The sets are sold in Poland and exported to the rest of Europe.
Poles now want bigger and better TV sets, some industry professionals said. LG Electronics, for instance, saw an increase last year in its sales of TVs with digital audio systems and flat screens, Fabinski said.
Poles also are rushing to buy home-entertainment systems, or home cinemas, as both complete sets and separate components, as well as digital videodisc players (DVD), said Slodki of Panasonic. Home cinema systems offer high quality pictures and multichannels, complete with a DVD, speakers and amplifiers and cost from zl. 3,500 to several thousands of zlotys, he said. Sales of DVDs alone, which were introduced in Poland in 1998, shot up 200% last year, according to Pawel Balamucki, product manager and marketing specialist at Grundig Polska.
Among the personal-use gadgets, Poles are buying Minidiscs and portable CD players with antishock systems that prevent skipped beats while users listen to their favorite tunes when running or biking. Other digital equipment, including audio recorders and video camcorders that use memory chips or memory cards to interact with other gadgets, are also popular. Panasonic, for instance, is trying to offer more portable models that use digital technologies, Slodki said.
"These (products) have big potential," said Grzegorz Wachowicz, the manager of the consumer electronics department at Sharp Electronics Polska (http://www.sharp.pl), which launched its consumer electronics line last January. "They are not new, but they are not widespread in Poland yet."
