Yamaha 2003 Annual Report Download - page 8

6YAMAHA CORPORATION
Chinese Market
In addition to serving as a major
manufacturing region, China com-
prises a significant market of 1.3 bil-
lion people. Given the Company’s
traditional strengths in the area of
musical instruments and the Chinese
population’s enthusiasm for educa-
tion, YAMAHA has high expecta-
tions for this market. For the past 10
years, YAMAHA has been operating
electronic keyboard schools in China
and at present has 30,000 registered
students. Building on this success,
our goal is to broaden our music
education offerings in China by
exporting the music school system
we have developed in Japan and
drawing on the expertise we have
acquired providing music education
under that system.
To integrate our sales and market-
ing activities in China, we established
Yamaha Music & Electronics (China)
Co., Ltd., in Beijing in August 2002,
and that company began full-scale
operations in April 2003. Our audio-
visual plant in Suzhou came on line
in March 2003. A piano and guitar
factory in Hangzhou is scheduled to
start up next year. These moves have
been undertaken in line with our goal
of complementing our three preexist-
ing Chinese factories and sales units
with a comprehensive system that can
handle everything from manufactur-
ing to sales, thereby facilitating the
greater market penetration of the
YAMAHA brand.
Music Production Market
The market for music production equip-
ment has strong growth prospects,
particularly in the United States and
Europe, and YAMAHA has achieved
steady sales growth in this area by
focusing its investment on digital
mixers and synthesizers. In addition,
the Company is working to expand its
business through the establishment
of a strong sales organization.
We are also making strong efforts
to develop businesses in the promis-
ing media-related market.
Media-Related Business
Working to create new ways of enjoy-
ing sound and music in the broadband
age, we are promoting a comprehen-
sive media strategy that draws on syn-
ergies among our hardware, software,
and content businesses.
In fiscal 2000, we launched “Music
Front,” which facilitates the discovery
and promotion of new artists via the
Internet and has already enabled four
groups to make performance debuts.
In the three full years since the launch
of our ringing melody distribution
service, the number of subscribers
has reached 3.5 million in Japan.
During the year, we added two
additional services to our ringing
melody distribution site, “guitar-hatsu”
(in May 2002) and “piano-hatsu” (in
March 2003). Also, in March 2003,
we launched a musical score printing
service that allows users to purchase
at convenience stores actual printed
scores for ringing melodies ordered