IFA 2020 organizers are confident conditions Sept. 3-5 will permit a vastly downsized in-person event at the Messe Berlin fairgrounds, limited to 4,000 people daily, with no consumers and a three-day run instead of the usual six, they said at a virtual news conference Tuesday. The show will have “virtual opportunities” for those who can’t or don’t want to travel to Berlin, and would move to an all-virtual format as a “fallback” if the pandemic worsens, said IFA Berlin Executive Director Jens Heithecker. “We cannot simply shut down the global economy and tell everybody to come back next year,” said Heithecker. “After all the event cancellations the past five months, our industry urgently needs the platform where it can showcase its innovation, so that it can recover and rebound.” Berlin is one of the few capital cities in the world to be “relatively unaffected” by COVID-19, said Heithecker. IFA consulted with local health authorities, and “together we have agreed on a safe and workable solution” for the 2020 show, he said. The gathering and CES often compete for bragging rights about which has more attendees, who in normal years number far above 100,000.
LG sees many automotive applications on the ATSC 3.0 road map, John Taylor, senior vice president-public affairs and communications, told a CTA-NAB webinar Monday. “The automotive makers that we’re speaking to” see big opportunities for 3.0 in “backseat entertainment” and the technology’s “one-to-many architecture,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Arthur Schwab in Pittsburgh Thursday ordered consolidated (in Pacer) nearly two dozen complaints from advocates for the blind against Onkyo, Sound United, Vizio and other consumer product companies. The complaints, filed by nine plaintiffs individually or in tandem with others, allege the companies fail to make their e-commerce sites accessible to the visually impaired, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their alleged negligence is especially worrisome during the COVID-19 pandemic, say the complaints, because shelter-in-place orders make it more important for the blind to have access to online retailers. Sound United "takes all complaints very seriously," emailed a spokesperson Thursday. "We cannot comment further on pending litigation.” Onkyo and Vizio didn’t respond to queries.
If COVID-19-induced telework persists after the pandemic, it could speed virtual reality adoption, said eMagin CEO Andrew Sculley on a Thursday investor call. “If I'm sitting at the office and I'm a stock trader or something like that, I may have six screens.” There’s “talk” of replacing them with one VR headset, he said. “If we continue to work at home, that would make it very convenient instead of requiring me to have six screens on my dining room table.” The "consumer world thinks that our technology is the way to go,” the executive said as his company reported Q1 results.
Cisco’s Webex videoconferencing platform is operating “at three times the capacity we were running at in February to manage the dramatic increase in usage growth” during the COVID-19 pandemic, said CEO Chuck Robbins on a quarterly call Wednesday. “We had well over 500 million meeting participants, generating 25 billion meeting minutes in April,” he said. Cisco added “many new prospects” through free Webex trials “that we anticipate converting to revenue in the future,” he said. Many enterprise customers already had Webex licenses but “exceeded their usage” and needed to add more users, said Robbins. “We'll work with them to clean that up in the future.” The priority during the crisis was “getting them up and running and just allowing them to be productive,” he said. Cisco spent the past two years “rebuilding and modernizing the Webex architecture,” he said. “We've now gone through two months of building out capacity on a global basis. Webex was the largest platform in the world in February, and now it's three times what it was then.” The stock closed up 4.5% Thursday at $43.85.
Operating profit in Sony Electronics Products & Solutions took an estimated 35.1 billion yen ($327.8 million) hit from COVID-19 in the fiscal year ended March 31. “Of all our businesses, we expect the EP&S segment to be impacted the most from the coronavirus,” said Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki in a virtual Tokyo briefing Wednesday. The stock's American depositary receipts closed down 4.3% at $62.78. Components suppliers in Malaysia and the Philippines “reduced their operations, causing a delay in the production of some of our products due to component shortages,” said Totoki. “On the demand side, due to the closure and shutdown of retail stores globally, retail sales have decreased significantly. The severity of the impact on a geographical basis is changing frequently, but deterioration of market conditions in Europe is currently the most severe.” EP&S sales for the year declined 14% to 1.99 trillion yen ($18.6 billion), said Totoki. Sony sold 3.2 million smartphones for the year, down about half from a year earlier. Q4 sales were 400,000 handsets. Market share leader Samsung sold 295 million smartphones in 2019.
The first ATSC 3.0-compliant TVs from LG, Samsung and Sony bearing the NextGenTV logo are available for purchase, though the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down much brick-and-mortar retail or confined it to curbside pickup, said executives at the NAB Show Express virtual event. “The question we’re all grappling with is, what will this new normal be?” said John Taylor, LG senior vice president-public affairs and communications.
Vizio and its suppliers TPV and Xianyang CaiHong Optoelectronics wrongly used the COVID-19 pandemic to argue against an International Trade Commission import ban on LCD displays (see 2005090002), said Sharp Electronics in rebuttal comments posted Monday in docket 337-3451. Sharp’s April 21 complaint seeks cease and desist and limited exclusion orders against displays from the three companies for allegedly infringing five Sharp LCD patents. The products are large TV panels “used primarily for entertainment,” a “small subset” of the LCD screens the public is using for telework and distance learning under coronavirus stay-at-home restrictions, said Sharp. The COVID-19 argument against an import ban is based on “past facts” that are “subject to change,” it said. “The relevant facts are those that exist when the remedial orders issue.” Opponents of an import ban during the “remedy phase” of a Tariff Act Section 337 investigation into Sharp’s allegations “can submit evidence and comments,” and the ITC “can determine whether remedial orders harm the public interest,” it said.
LCDs “are essential to the U.S. economy,” and the COVID-19 pandemic “has only magnified their importance to the national economy, health, and public safety,” said Vizio and its suppliers Xianyang CaiHong Optoelectronics and TPV in public interest comments (login required) at the International Trade Commission in docket 337-3451. Sharp’s April 21 complaint seeks cease and desist and limited exclusion orders against displays from the three companies for allegedly infringing five Sharp LCD patents (see 2004270045). “The disruption in the LCD panels market that Sharp seeks will not be resolved within commercially reasonable time,” said the companies. “Certain major manufacturers of LCD panels are exiting the business by the end of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted the global supply chain of LCD panels,” they said in reference to the Samsung Display decision to speed its exit from LCD production in South Korea and source future supply from Chinese panel makers (see 2004280016). “The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the central role of LCD panels,” said the companies. “Non-essential office workers are using LCD displays at home to conduct their daily business.” Students are participating in remote learning “through their video displays,” they said. “The essential nature of these products was apparent when several big-box electronic stores in the U.S. depleted, and were unable to refill, inventories of computer monitors.” Even TVs “are no longer used solely for entertainment,” they said.
Sonos and Tile landed List 4 tariff exclusions for wireless devices imported from China under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule’s 8517.62.0090 subheading. Sonos won exemption for its wireless mesh network audio components. Tile’s exclusion was for a Bluetooth tracking device that meshes with a smartphone app for finding misplaced keys and other common household articles. The exclusions are retroactive to Sept. 1 when List 4 took effect and expire Sept. 1. About 50 exclusion requests were filed for 8517.62.0090 goods, mostly for Bluetooth devices, of which 45 remained in a stage 1 or stage 2 administrative hold when we checked the docket Monday. Sonos landed an exemption on its wireless network speakers in March, as did the Apple Watch and Fitness activity trackers.