Unilumin recently opened its office in Singapore. Inavate caught up with Steve Scorse, vice president of EMEA at Unilumin, and Tony Zhang Hui, the newly appointed managing director of Southeast Asia at Unilumin, to discuss what the move means for the manufacturer.
The AV business is going global. We’re seeing manufacturers, integrators, consultants and even distributors expand to support clients across borders and time zones. It comes as no surprise that Unilumin is doing the same. Steve Scorse, vice president of EMEA at Unilumin, says: “We’re a global brand and we are finding out that we must provide sales and support backup everywhere. Unilumin has global clients and they expect us to support them wherever they are installing our products.”
The response from Unilmuin to the AV business going global has been expansion into new territories. Scorse says: “We have presence in Hong Kong and Australia in Asia but there is a large gap between these two locations and we wanted to address that with an office in Southeast Asia. Singapore is a great place to start.”
Regarding the opening of an office in Singapore, he says: “This is our ninth full subsidiary and we have a total of 15 international offices. These have been built up over the course of the last three years. Previously, all our operations were run out of China. The office in Singapore is a natural extension of our international expansion. We want to be number one in every market and you cannot do that if you are not physically present in those markets. It is important to have the infrastructure in place to be responsive. You have to have people on the ground because it is no feasible to keep flying resources all around the globe to provide support.”
Tony Zhang Hui, the newly appointed managing director of Southeast Asia at Unilumin, joins the manufacturer from the ICT industry where he worked for Huawei handling responsibilities for the Southeast Asia region.
What will be his aim at the helm for Unilumin in Southeast Asia? Hui comments: “Our strategy is simple, it is to provide support and local presence, to serve our customers better and more closely. Another is to develop our channel program for our customers. During my time at Huawei I implemented a successful channel program for Southeast Asia and now at Unilumin I feel that we have partners we can work with in mutually a beneficial manner to make the pie bigger for everyone.”
His outlook for the region is positive and he says: “In Southeast Asia, the economy is booming, there is high growth and foreign investment is pouring in. This made it easy to decide to establish a regional headquarter in Singapore. We will also have presence in Malaysia and in Jakarta, Indonesia so that we can continue our efforts for developing our technology and providing repairs to region locally.”
Support was a key consideration and a driving force behind the Singapore office and Unilumin’s presence in Southeast Asia. Scorse explains: “When we sell a videowall, it has be installed and the integrator requires a certain level of support with this. We provide our own engineers to help with the installation, alignment and commissioning so that the integrator is happy and the end user is happy.”
He continues: “Then you have the warranty which may be between two years to five years. While the full onsite maintenance contract resides with the integrator, they often require help with regards to repairs and they want this help to be fairly immediate. They don’t want us to say that we’ll be there in a week which is typically unacceptable. We need to be able to go in and help diagnose the problem if the integrator cannot figure it out and then help them rectify it. If product requires repair, we cannot send it back to China because that would cost too much and take too much time. We can generally repair 90% of all product failure at our support depots and we are establishing that in Southeast Asia.”
Looking forward, Scorse believes that there is ample room to grow in Southeast Asia and also on a global scale. He believes that technological development of the LED products will help. Scorse concludes: “Mini-LED offers a massive advantage. There is a major development path to work on in order to get the right yields and get production up to speed but it will get there, and it will revolutionise the market. Mini-LED will enable more applications which will open up more markets especially for the smaller pixel pitch products. For example, one of the reasons the rental market does not offer 0.9mm tiles is because they are scared that the tiles will break. Once you have a robust 0.9mm tile you can start renting it. There is a lot of market opportunity if you can provide the right product.”