Newsletter: Viewpoint

For our September, “back to work” issue, we invited Ricky Tan, regional sales manager, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, to provide his take on local pro AV market conditions and trends.

I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my perspective on today’s Southeast Asia market, which is undeniably trending upwards. For instance, AVoIP was probably just 20% of the projects coming to market a year ago. Now we are easily seeing it more like 40% with broad interest from both large-scale and smaller-scale projects. We are seeing more consultant designs which are AVoIP-based, as opposed to HDBase-T or other older technologies. And we’re seeing that across the board – regardless of whether customers are seeking 1 or 10Gb solutions.

This is not just a pandemic rebound; I think it's more where customers are starting to accept that AVoIP might be a better option in terms of future-proofing their implementations and expanding them over time. We’re starting to see projects coming out with these requirements. On the flip side, we are concerned that some integrators and even some consultants are still more comfortable with traditional or legacy solutions; they’re not as well-educated on AVoIP and therefore reluctant to change course.

Educating the Southeast Asian Market

To date, the industry has placed a greater focus on AVoIP education in North America and Europe. ZeeVee is committed to this market so we are placing a heavier emphasis on various aspects of educating the market and building awareness. Long-term that will pay off in terms of even greater market acceptance.

Our strategy encompasses various forms of education – including trade shows, webinars and success stories. Our focus remains to educate the market holistically and not to just talk about ‘our stuff’—but to share how the technology has been utilized with great success here in Southeast Asia and globally.

We also want to bring a more enlightened view to the industry. We are leading the real conversation which actually addresses the pros and cons of compressed and uncompressed network architecture versus the marketing speak of 1Gb versus 10Gb. It's more about what your need is, the application and whether you need an uncompressed 4K SDVoE signal distribution system or whether compressed 4K is satisfactory for your particular application. That seems to be resonating better in this market than it has in the U.S. and secondarily, in Europe.

For some time, it has been evident in our day-to-day dealings that integrators, consultants and end-users want to see the technology working with their own eyes. That makes it critical to get out of the office and to demonstrate our solutions – and we make it easy for interested parties to put hands on and evaluate our systems. Once our partners see how easy it is for them to install and use AVoIP, they become believers and begin specifying or installing systems as new situations present themselves.

For ZeeVee, we’ve put an emphasis on participating in regional trade shows such as the Pro Integration AV show in Singapore, InfoComm in Thailand and ISE in Barcelona, visiting large enterprises and getting demonstration kits into the hands of integrators.

Lingering Supply Chain Disruptions 

Supply chain issues appear to be a lingering issue for many of our competitors who are still struggling and, in many cases, can’t promise delivery for as far out as a year. We have been delivering our SDVoE and AVoIP products right through the pandemic with strong stock on hand today.

Through clever product planning and building extra stock of our products, our team was able to sidestep most of the negative impact of supply chain shortages. In many cases, we have been able to ‘flip’ projects based on competitive products with extraordinarily long wait times. In many cases, integrators that have experienced the ease of installation, simplicity of use and performance characteristics of our products have returned as repeat customers.

We bring an additional advantage to the market here since our AVoIP solutions are capable of more than just video distribution and include video processing and canvassing for LED walls. We are able to remove boxes from that whole design which both saves money and quickens completion of projects.

It’s for these reasons that we are optimistic – even bullish – on where the Southeast Asian market is headed. We thank local market integrators and consultants for embracing our approach, company and product set, We promise an even stronger commitment and cooperation in the years ahead.

Regards,

Ricky Tan

Regional Sales Manager, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, ZeeVee