I'm not so sure I agree! According to the chart, "communications equipment" seems to make up about 40% of the Kenwood side of the business. Of course, they do a lot of non-ham stuff (marine, etc.), but still, if you are in the communications business, it isn't a huge jump necessarily from one type of communications equipment to another. Lots of similarity in the R & D, etc.
Kenwood seemed to de-emphasize ham gear in the late 90's and early 21st century. But I think a lot of that might have been economics--I bought my Mark V, for example, near the end of it's production, and paid less than $2K for it new. If you recall, the Yen was in the toilet back then, and I think Kenwood was having trouble justifying the production costs vs. the kind of prices that ham gear was selling for back then. Then Icom raised the bar with the IC7800, and Yaesu followed with the FT-9000. Suddenly, we were looking at $10,000 rigs, with subsequent "reduced capability" models that still demanded a $5K+ price tag. The economics changed! Even the K3, at about $4K was twice the price of the Mark V. Now just about every higher end rig is $3K to $4K minimum! That's not just inflation working, it's an elevation in the market itself! Kenwood came out with the TS-480 and TS-2000, but at low to mid-level prices, around the beginning of this century. They were not sure (I suspect) that other higher priced ham gear would succeed. Now I think there is enough market data to convince them that maybe the communications market (including ham gear) can be sold more profitably. Thus, I think that may be why they are putting their foot back into the water. At least that's how I interpret their announced intention to come out with a K3 "clone", and probably a high end rig to compete with the big Icom and Yaesu rigs. It's really hard to figure out how japanese companies make their product decisions. They are very secretive about a lot of things--it's an entirely different process there. You also have to realize that just the japanese market alone is huge! I think they have something like three times the number of hams that we have here in the U.S. A lot of their products never even make it to the international market. If we understood the japanese market better, we would probably have a much better idea about just what they might be willling to produce. That fact is obvious to me, due to the fact that they have already shown a prototype in Japan as much as a year or more in advance of our seeing it at Dayton. My guess is that the response in Japan has been positive--at least positive enough to justify giving it exposure elsewhere. If they really do announce a K3 "clone" at Dayton this year, I have little doubt that something even bigger will follow, like a competitor to the IC-7800. Kenwood is a big company--a very big company--even bigger than Icom or Yaesu if I'm not mistaken. I think what we've seen in the last 10 years or so is a very big company get very conservative about a segment of their market for a variety of reasons. It just may be that, like turning an aircraft carrier, this very big company is slowly turning into the wind to launch. If I look at this from a different angle, it makes no sense that they would introduce new products, after such a hiatus, unless they had bigger plans on the drawing board. Dave W7AQK ----- Original Message ----- From: "Guy Olinger K2AV" <olin...@bellsouth.net> To: "KE4INM" <ke4...@gmail.com> Cc: "Elecraft Reflector" <elecraft@mailman.qth.net> Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 3:11 PM Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Kenwood's Future > Yup. Read and weep. We are a niche. Very much a niche, and a > complaining niche at that. > > On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 3:07 PM, KE4INM <ke4...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I may be mistaken, but I don't see Amateur Radio in there future. Check >> out >> the JVC-Kenwood Holdings Website. >> >> http://www.jk-holdings.com/en/corporate/strategy/index.html >> ______________________________________________________________ >> Elecraft mailing list >> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft >> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm >> Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net >> >> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net >> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html >> > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
