RSSCreative Returns to Profitability
By Ed Oswald | Published January 26, 2006, 12:10 PM
After three rough quarters, electronics maker Creative announced it had returned to significant profitability on Wednesday, posting a small profit of $8.2 million, including a $6.9 million investment gain. However profits fell 31 percent from the year ago quarter as Creative continued to struggle in the MP3 market dominated by Apple.
Creative chairman and CEO Sim Wong Hoo promised investors that the company would make money once again after it posted a poor showing in August of last year. Wednesday's announcement even surprised some analysts, who were expecting Creative to post a loss.
Craig McHugh, president of Creative Labs, seemed to suggest that the company's foray into MP3 players may begin to take a backseat in the near future. "In the next few quarters, we plan to further lower our inventory, reduce our overall level of operating expenses, and we will increase our focus on our higher-margin businesses," he said.
Those higher-margin business would be where the company has excelled, and in some cases dominated, like sound cards. Creative has instead let these markets languish; for example, MP3 players and Web cameras now make up 67 percent of revenue, versus 13 percent for sound cards.
2.6 million of Creative's MP3 players sold during the last quarter of 2005, far less than Apple's 14 million. Based on those numbers, Apple is now outselling the company at a rate of five to one, the largest margin yet.
Creative also says it would focus on bringing inventory levels down, which would allow it to be "more nimble on pricing," according to McHugh.
still can't forgive Creative for being utterly "un-creative" by releasing Zen Vision M...
Score: 0
|Creative is the only company that's actively making an effort to drasticaly improve PC sound i.e. Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi audio processor.
http://techreport.com/re...aster-x-fi/index.x?pg=1
Score: 0
|That's right, games these days require better sound cards to process more sounds at a time, to deliver more channels, and to add advanced effects like echos, which can tax the system processor.
Score: 0
|The sound cards were generally good, but the drivers were always problematic. In addition who needs a good sound card today, nothing is midi anymore it is all digital sound files.
Score: 0
|I think you may be surprised. MIDI is still in heavy use -- just not the 8bit crap sounds you think of. MIDI is still used for triggering samples that play back recorded wav sounds. It's nearly indistiguishable from reality when done well, since they are real sounds.
Also, you remember the guy in Ohio with the christmas lights on the beer commercial? MIDI triggered lights, I'm told.
Score: 0
|Valathax - Any aspiring or pro music producer using software and music hardware in combo pretty much needs MIDI or the gear doesn't work together.
Score: 0
|They had a lot of driver problems with their Audigy 2 cards and XP Pro. That has been resolved with the Audigy 4 line of products though.
Score: 0
|A good sound card is not just for Midi. 7.1 is a great option. Higher audio resolutions (for all the Digi DJs out there, the higher res encoding of a wav or compressed format will give you a smoother sound when scratching or mixing), better 3d Support (for games and dvd production). ASIO is great to have for audio editing and production. In fact, the only thing I find disappointing with my Audigy 2 Plat. card is the lack of real-time Dolby Digital. (So you don't have to change from spdif to analog on your receiver to play games). Midi is still widely used. Most people see it as "Sound effects" being played at a certain time (and it sounds like crap) when in fact it's a timing standard. It's used for audio production from different sets of professional audio hardware so they can talk on the same page. Even hardware that is using USB and fire wire have the disadvantage in that you have to have enough bandwidth for the device (could mean buying multiple PCI USB/Firewire controllers).
For the average Joe that just wants to rip CDs to MP3s and play em back, no, you don't really need anything other than onboard sound. For the mid user that wants real-time 3d sound, get a nice card. For the pros, creative is fine, but you should start looking elsewhere, in the pro-tools arena.
Score: 0
|Never understood why they would put out so many slightly different versions of the same hardware, then multiply that by so many different driver versions for each slightly different hardware version-- tailored to the different system resellers, retailers & manufacturers even sometimes when the hardware was identical...then further multiply this by the further different combination possibilities of the gameport & sound(not always both of the same exact line).
If it takes your breath away having to have read all that, imagine one w/ a different OS and/or w/o a drivers disc having to look for drivers, as Creative doesn't publish all versions- some maybe modified by others, the resellers may only publish for one or two OS versions, each driver version will not install with other basically identical hardware, and forget about getting driver updates...
Creative just msde it tought on itself and us: at the very least one giant repository install package shoulda been compiled and made readily available-- better to endure such a download than having to hope some kind soul uploaded somewhere their version #202 from their disc(plus then find this needle in the haystack).
I can just imagine the Chinese fire drill mess in place at their driver development site, as often the packages are for each os version, not just two categories like 9x & nt...
Score: 0
|They used to make decent sound cards. It would be nice to see them focus on that again. Might actually be proud to own a Creative sound-board again.
Score: 0
|