Sean Nero

T&T was not orig­i­nal­ly on Sam­sung Elec­tron­ics' pri­or­i­ty list of coun­tries in the when the group was ex­plor­ing new mar­kets to set up shop, height­en sales, and boost prof­its, says prod­uct man­ag­er for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean An­ge­lo Mar­coni.

A sam­pling of the mar­ket did not sug­gest it could sat­is­fy the elec­tron­ics gi­ant's sales and growth de­mands.

How­ev­er, Sam­sung de­cid­ed go ahead with an in­vest­ment in T&T and dis­cov­ered there was an in­sa­tiable ap­petite for the brand with this coun­try's tech-savvy pop­u­la­tion. As a re­sult, the com­pa­ny de­cid­ed to give fo­cus here.

Mar­coni, who spoke with the T&T Guardian at the launch of the Sam­sung's SUHD TV at Courts' Mega­s­tore last Thurs­day, said: "Right now the Caribbean mar­ket, specif­i­cal­ly in T&T, has be­come a ma­jor mar­ket for us. At the be­gin­ning, we were a lit­tle re­luc­tant, but we saw how the peo­ple were re­ceiv­ing our prod­ucts, falling in love with our brand. We said why not.

"We strong­ly be­lieve in the con­sis­ten­cy of the tech­nol­o­gy in the home. If you take a look at the in­ter­net and where we are go­ing, we can have wash­ing ma­chines, freez­ers, air-con­di­tion­ing, smart tele­vi­sions; all can be con­nect­ed. It's like an ad­di­tion­al at­tach­ment (the in­ter­net), but it's manda­to­ry.

"The tele­vi­sion by it­self is ac­tu­al­ly like the home en­ter­tain­ment sys­tem. We are go­ing the way of con­trol­ling every­thing from your smart tele­vi­sion. You can see what is hap­pen­ing in your freez­er or you can con­trol your wash­ing ma­chine. That's the fu­ture."

Mar­coni said ex­ist­ing and po­ten­tial cus­tomers need to up­grade the speed of their in­ter­net ser­vice to 10 or 20 mega bits to take full ad­van­tage of the tech­no­log­i­cal fea­tures the com­pa­ny is bring­ing to mar­ket through its prod­uct lines.

He said the in­tro­duc­tion of Sam­sung's SUHD TV is sig­nif­i­cant be­cause for the past 10 years the com­pa­ny had been chal­leng­ing it­self to pro­vide cus­tomers with the best ex­pe­ri­ence.

In con­junc­tion with the launch, Sam­sung has start­ed a pro­mo­tion, World of Won­ders, so cus­tomers pur­chas­ing se­lect­ed tele­vi­sion and au­dio prod­ucts be­tween Oc­to­ber 1 and No­vem­ber 3, get a chance to win a trip for two to one of the won­ders of the world.

"We can have apps, as you have on your smart phone. You can con­nect your smart phone to your tele­vi­sion and watch or lis­ten to all the con­tent.

"You come back from va­ca­tion with your fam­i­ly and you can see all your pho­tos with your fam­i­ly on the tele­vi­sion.

"It's much bet­ter than a small (com­put­er) screen. Very soon cus­tomers would be able to use their mo­bile de­vices to con­trol their tele­vi­sion. You can down­load the smart TV view­er app and con­trol the whole tele­vi­sion."