VTech dominates two niche markets: electronic learning aids for kids and high-frequency cordless telephones.
VTech and its Asian competitors, margins are less than half those elsewhere in the business.
So are toddler-oriented DVDs and videogames made by LeapFrog Enterprises , Brainy Baby and Vtech .
Instead of promoting heavily on TV during Saturday morning cartoons, VTech advertises in publications like Good Housekeeping.
Johnson Electric and Vtech - industrial companies like these are very focused and will be seeing marginal improvement.
Now 47 and chairman of VTech, Wong recalls what was the conventional wisdom in the toy business in the early 1980s.
Earlier, seven high-tech firms pledged to help reshape Hong Kong into a high-tech hub including Motorola, Nortel, 3M and local enterprise VTech.
VTech can dominate the business is the troubled state of toy shops.
VTech, the company you likely associate with old school telephones and educational toys, is breaking out of its shell in a big way.
ENGADGET: VTech plunges into home audio market with IS9181 WiFi radio
VTech's entire 2009 product line will be on display at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 8-11, at the Palms Casino Resort.
ENGADGET: VTech plunges into home audio market with IS9181 WiFi radio
The new VTech DECT lineup, including the IS9181 Wi-Fi Internet Radio, can be purchased at major retail outlets and online at www.vtechphones.com in Spring 2009.
ENGADGET: VTech plunges into home audio market with IS9181 WiFi radio
"VTech products engage the child with technology while teaching basic concepts like shapes, colors, letters and numbers, " explains Tula Karras, toy editor of Child magazine.
Though headquartered in Hong Kong, VTech is really an international outfit.
"We're appealing to the parents so we don't need to bombard the kids with ads, " says Jack Hirsch, the Wheeling, Illinois-based chairman of VTech Industries, LLC.
It has more than 60% of the electronic educational toy market in the U.S. and Europe, selling under the VTech name through chains such as Toys "R" Us.
VTech, which will never have the marketing clout of the rich-world giants, is happier using its market as a launch pad into electronics than into other sorts of toys.
According to these criteria, Vtech, an electronics maker in Hong Kong (FORBES GLOBAL, May 28), and Chartered Semiconductor, a leading semiconductor maker in Singapore, are on the endangered list (see table).
Over the past year the stock price of Hong Kong-listed VTech has more than doubled, at a time when the local Hang Seng index has plummeted and local real estate values have collapsed.
VTech was founded in 1976 by Hong Kong's Allan Wong, an electrical engineer with a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin who had worked as a design engineer for NCR in Hong Kong.
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