by Anton Shilov
09/26/2002 | 09:03 PM
What would a company need to start selling graphics cards? Probably only desire and a number of smart managers. Sales channels and brand recognition can be earned a bit later, provided that the company really offers competitive solutions and really works with the customers and promote the products somehow. As you know from our previous issues, it is quite hard to live and prosper on computer components market nowadays, as a result, vendors often try to find themselves a new niche to sell a new kind of products. Memory makers, mainboard manufacturers now offer graphics cards, companies that were originally devoted for graphics cards start to sell mainboards and so on. Well, TerraTec has been on the market since 1994 and offered loads of pretty popular and quality sound cards intended for professional use. They are known all around the world and especially in Europe. Today TerraTec decided to offer its customers a number of graphics cards based on the GeForce4 Ti4200/4600 and GeForce4 MX GPUs from NVIDIA under Mystify trademark.
In fact, graphics cards seem to be much easier to develop and manufacture compared to high-quality sound cards. It is practically impossible for companies like Palit Daytona or Pine to represent the state-of-art sound card, like Creative Labs’Audigy 2, but since NVIDIA and ATI offer them complete range of reference designs and recommendations for graphics cards, they really can offer quality and competitive solutions. The reason why small Chinese companies cannot maintain a strong position on European and the US markets is the lack of brand recognition and promotion. TerraTec is already here, so it is quite logical for them to start selling graphics cards.<%BANNER[article]%>
I have no idea if the company will sell the products made on their primary manufacturing facilities, or outsource the devices to an unknown company in Asia. Pricing and availability timeframe are to be decided depending on the region.