Irvine’s Vizio Inc. is getting good reviews and has shelf space reserved with mega-retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as it enters the competitive tablet market.
The company, best known for the flat TVs it designs and markets here, is ready to roll out its 8-inch, high-resolution Vizio VTAB1008 tablet.
The tablet debuted at the Consumer Electronics Association Line Shows in New York late last month. Weighing in at slightly more than a pound, it features Bluetooth, built-in GPS, a USB port, three stereo speakers and a battery life of up to 10 hours per charge.
It’s expected to hit the market this month and sell for about $350.
“Vizio clearly did not skimp on the hardware to deliver a tablet at this price point,” wrote zdnet.com’s Gloria Sin in a recent review.
CNET blogger Lance Whitney found the touch screen to be “very responsive” and the user interface “quite fluid.”
The tablet is set to be carried in Walmart stores, where Vizio’s liquid-crystal display TVs get big shelf space (see related story, page 1).
Some 24 million tablets are expected to sell this year, up from 10.3 million in 2010, according to Forrester Research Inc. in Massachusetts. The total is expected to grow to 35 million in 2012.
Apple Inc. is the market leader and has sold more than 20 million iPads since its launch last year.
Competitors such as Acer, Research in Motion and Samsung, among others, have seen underwhelming reception and weaker than expected sales, according to a recent analyst report from JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Western Dig Bucks Trend
Irvine-based disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. bucked a downward trend on Wall Street with the help of two recent nods from analysts.
The company, which makes disk drives for computers and consumer electronics, could beat expectations for the June quarter and up its guidance for the three months through September, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty.
Huberty based her projection on a revised forecast for industrywide drive sales.
Through the June quarter, 163 million disk drives could be sold, up from an earlier estimate of 160 million.
For the September quarter, 180 million drives could be sold, according to a projection from Huberty that’s a hike from an earlier forecast of 170 million.
Improving demand for disk drives from PC makers and a stable supply chain are behind Huberty’s upped forecast.
The other nod came from Jim Cramer, host of the CNBC’s “Mad Money.” He included Western Digital in the “competitors to watch” section as a part of his stock picks late last month.
Western Digital is the largest maker of disk drives, followed by Northern California’s Seagate Technology LLC.
Its pending $4.3 billion buy of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Ltd. stands to make Western Digital the undisputed drive leader by any measure. The deal is expected to take the company’s market share to 49%, up from 31% now.
The move prompted Seagate to offer $1.4 billion for Samsung Electronics Co.’s disk drive business, which would give Seagate added market share and access to Samsung flash memory chips used in solid state drives that use chips instead of spinning disks to store data.
Adding Samsung’s drive business would give Seagate about 40% of the market, up from about 30% now.
Identive in Russell
Santa Ana’s Identive Group Inc., a maker of scanners, readers, cards and other security devices for buildings and computers, has been added to the Russell Global Index
Membership in the Russell index lasts one year and includes a spot on its large-cap, small-cap or all-cap indexes as well as corresponding yard sticks based on sector and country.
Russell determines membership in its indexes primarily by market capitalization and growth patterns.
Identive had a market value of $118 million as of late last week.
Russell ranks the 4,000 largest U.S. publicly traded stocks, and its several indexes widely are used as benchmarks by investors. The index benchmarks some $3.9 trillion in U.S. institutional assets. The designation will bring added credibility, exposure and investor awareness, according to Chief Executive Ayman Ashour.
“Inclusion in (the Russell) indices will not only likely broaden our shareholder base and market exposure, but we believe it will drive demand for our stock, as index buyers rebalance their portfolios in the weeks ahead,” he said.
Daily Deals Dinged
The explosion of daily deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial are starting to overrun email inboxes and overwhelm consumers, according to a recent survey by Los Angeles-based pricegrabber.com, part of Costa Mesa-based Experian North America.
The survey, which queried nearly 2,100 online shoppers in late May, found that 52% of shoppers feel overwhelmed and 63% said they receive two or more local deals a day.
Pricegrabber.com is an online shopping site that compares prices, availability and features on retail products. It conducted the survey in a bid to drum up interest for its new deal search engine that started last month.
