Along with Windows, a Canadian manufacturer of display and computer technology is also celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.TTX Canada Inc., based in Mississauga, Ont., was founded as a maker of CRT monitors.
Over the years the company’s brain trust has remained the same: Doug Murray as president and Gil Broude as general manager. Both have seen the ups and downs in the Canadian IT channel. Broude recently made time for CDN to discuss yesterday and today.
CDN: You must have survived a lot of down periods. If you had to pick one thing that made you last this long, what would it be?
Gil Broude: I will pick one that lumps a lot together. It is our expertise and specialization. It is being good at what we do. Being experts means that our customers come to us as an authority. We do not sell commodity products — that they can get anywhere. They value our experience and development in certain markets.
CDN: The monitor market is, if I had to describe it, incredibly overcrowded, with 57 vendors peddling product in Canada. TTX is in that mix, and do you ever wonder how you manage?
G.B.: A portion of our business competes directly with the other 56 brands and for that segment we try to bring the same attitude. It is a caring approach and we stand behind the product. But that crowded market place is only a segment of the business. We also expanded into other markets that are not crowded with specialized product to differentiate ourselves. We have touchscreens in many flavours and we have displays that are not desktop displays. All the competition is on the desktop. We have gone into smaller sizes, larger sizes, wall-mounted kiosk displays and those that are wash-down models, that are visible in bright daylight, or high impact displays that can absorb punishment. Those are examples of the type of products that those other 56 vendors are not active in.
CDN: Do you think the display market is unhealthy with so many vendors?
G.B.: Any market that has that many vendors is not going to have that many vendors for long. So, yes, it is unhealthy and unstable. It is going to go the way of the TV industry. We’ll see continued consolidation and in that segment only a fraction will survive.
CDN: According to Evans Research, TTX is No. 12 in the market in Canada. Can you continue to be out of the top ten for long?
G.B.: Yes, for sure because we are going for quality not quantity. We sell thousands of units, but expanding into the specialized side of the business where quantity does not matter has helped a great deal. It is the quality and the service we offer that matters to the client.
CDN: Did you see early on that the number of display vendors was increasing and that was the reason for entering the notebook market?
G.B.: We entered to diversify and we also felt it was a good fit with our skill set. It has been and continues to be a challenging market. Similar to displays, our intention is not to just compete with dozens of other brands offering something similar without any ability to differentiate ourselves. So in notebooks we introduced a ruggedized product. This is more specialized and targeted at specific vertical markets and projects. The number of vendors is far smaller and our customers, once they get into the differentiation, are willing to pay for that. If I try and sell an $899 laptop for a student or for a home user it is entry-level business. How can we be different than the others? Undercut them? There is no future in that. We are still in that market for corporate, home, and student notebook markets, but we are growing in the segment that we can be different and add value.
CDN:You recently made a deal with AOC to become the Canadian distributor of their LCD and CRT displays. On the surface, to me, it does not make a lot of sense to be carrying a competing brand. Won’t it cannibalize your own TTX brand?
G.B.: In terms of the market that I described — the standard desktop monitor — for us it makes sense to work with an established brand like AOC. They have the largest factory in the world. We are familiar with their product. It is high quality and it helps us to dedicate our efforts under the TTX brand into the specialized segments.
Our customers who look for standardized desktop monitors look for competitive pricing and they rely on us to deliver the best monitor. If we have TTX in stock they buy TTX, and they will happily buy AOC if we have that in stock because they are getting us.
CDN: Is the AOC deal an indication that TTX does not want to play in the low end or even the high end of the LCD/CRT display market and wants to be a custom display manufacturer?
G.B.: We will continue to leverage our roots in the display business and we will not pick and choose. We are not going to walk away from the broad-based market. We feel we can best service that market with the AOC product side-by-side with our product. At the same time, we will be able to continue to go full force into developing those unique products for customers in the specialized market segments.
