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GOLDSEA 100
No. 4: James Chu
ViewSonic Corporation
hey're surprisingly small, barely three inches long fully-grown. Those tiny parti-colored Australian finches became superstars in the PC monitor universe after James Chu discovered them while flipping through wildlife books for an appealing icon for an ad campaign.
"I wanted something colorful and warm like the Apple logo," recalls Chu. Those first ads featuring a trio of the colorful birds launched the ViewSonic brand ubiquitous today in the pages of PC catalogs flooding the mailboxes of computer users.
When he launched that first campaign in 1990 Chu had been in the country less than three years. After being fired by a Taiwanese keyboard company, his only assets were a list of resellers and a credit commitment from Seiko, then trying to crack the U.S. monitor market. Fortunately, the finches were a hit, turning ViewSonic in short order into the world's fastest-growing monitor brand. In a little over six years sales jumped from zero to $826 million for 1997, putting Chu within striking distance of NEC's position as America's top independent monitor brand.
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He reached that goal in the third quarter of 1998, but the rewards were less than hoped for. Intensifying competition in the PC hardware industry dropped the average price of a monitor by 40% and squeezed gross margins down to a slender 10% from the earlier 30%. What's more, ViewSonic now faces a growing field of kamikaze Japanese industrial giants and a slew of no-name brands willing to forego profits for a piece of the action. Worse yet, the better part of the growth in monitor sales is being hogged by the trio of Compaq, Dell and HP, each of which individually outsells ViewSonic simply by bundling their own monitors with each PC.
In an effort to push ViewSonic monitors onto center stage in the PC-buying decision, Chu is now pouring millions into an ad blitz in every business and computer magazine you can shake a stick at. Even with co-branding money from Intel, the new campaign is further squeezing profits. If it succeeds, ViewSonic could emerge a year later with a bigger slice of a less crowded market. But in a time of falling prices for rising quality, there's the danger that consumers may shy away from premium brands built with expensive ad blitzes. ViewSonic would enjoy a boost if pricier flat-panel TFT LCD displays emerge quickly into the mainstream to shift buyers' focus away from the PC.
With 1998 sales of $941 million, a relatively trim global workforce of 650 and a brand that enjoys solid recognition with resellers, ViewSonic has maneuvering room.
Regardless of how the current marketing scheme proves out, James Chu has proven himself to possess instincts that can turn crises into opportunities -- even if it means making the kinds of big moves he was forced to make back in ViewSonic's early days. He still owns 100% of ViewSonic's shares. Current profit figures were not revealed.
James Chu was born in 1957 in southern Taiwan. Despite a self-described shyness, he entered the business world by selling Chinese-English dictionaries and English-instruction tapes before landing a job as the sales manager of a small Taiwanese keyboard maker. He founded Keypoint in 1987 in Santa Fe Springs, then changed its name to ViewSonic in 1990 after moving into the monitor market. He is married and has two gradeschool children. The family lives a brief Benz cruise from ViewSonic's Walnut headquarters.
| "I wanted something colorful and warm like the Apple logo." |