One of the ongoing issues with Samsung in the North American security space has been confusion between the Samsung Techwin and Samsung Electronics brands, which we’ve talked about before. Will GenNx360’s involvement and the new structure help provide some additional differentiation between the companies in the marketplace?
Steve Walin: You may not be aware that Samsung has announced the merger between those two businesses. There was an announcement done in Korea about two months ago, and I’m not sure that it made it here to any large U.S.-based announcement so you have the scoop! Effective Jan. 1, Samsung’s video surveillance business and Samsung Techwin’s CCTV business are coming together to form one Samsung security type business. Both companies are literally being merged together, so they are indeed organizations that are being combined and so on. So, where we see this eventually evolving to is that there will be one Samsung product line, and it won’t be called Electronics; it won’t be called Techwin. It’ll be called Samsung. And, we’ll play a major role in rolling that out for the Americas as we have for Samsung Electronics for the last 10 years. Those discussions are ongoing right now, and I think you’ll be hearing some news about how all that’s going to work and what it’s all going to look like in early January. We are really thrilled that this decision has been taken at the Samsung group level in Korea, and that these two businesses are going to be put together and end the confusion that has been taking place in the market for the last several years.
Lloyd Trotter: The good thing about it is I think they saw the same confusion and conflicts, and they took the action to begin to alleviate that. I think with that clarity it’s going to be, “Everybody, now let’s work on what’s important,” and that’s how do we grow faster?
GVI Security was honored for 10 years of service to Samsung Electronics at ISC West 2009. GVI CEO Steve Walin is pictured second from right.
Lloyd, given your background and vantage point, were you very surprised by GE selling off its whole security division?
Trotter: Surprised? No, because the rumor has been out there for quite awhile. I’m a little bit disappointed in that since I got them into the security arena and it’s a space that I still like. Unfortunately, our funds aren’t big enough, but we would have loved to do that transaction.
Did you think it would be UTC?
Trotter: Well, yeah. The normal suspect customers were hanging around. It’s a business that’s roughly $2 billion in sales and it had to be a large player to take it down. I think what I read in the press, they paid roughly a $1.8 billion for it. That’s a pretty big check to write in this environment.
Speaking of the environment, what are you each of you seeing, as we’re moving into 2010 here, for the business community from sort of the big perspective, and more specifically, the part of the industry that you
posted @ Wednesday, January 06, 2010 3:23 PM