MP3 player market in 2005, according to IDC.
unit, based in Vancouver, Washington, held 3.4% of the U.S. The company also announced plans for digital audio players featuring Internet telephony. This referred to users controlling their MP3 devices with their thumbs, just as they do their cell phones and text messaging devices. It referred to the U10 flash player as the thumb thing. iriver adopted a new marketing strategy in 2005, attempting to grab mindshare from Apple. The launch of Apple's iPod Shuffle hurt iriver sales and it dropped from the top ranking in flash-based players. In 2005 the company decided to focus entirely on flash players like the H10, and the development of jukeboxes (except from the 20 GB version of the H10) was stopped as a result. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products. During this time, the company went through a rebranding, including changing the name from iRiver to iriver, and a ruby red themed logo in place of blue.
īy 2004 iRiver had gained solid market share in the digital audio player market in both the United States and Japan, and sold a total of 2.8 million players worldwide, of which 1.7 million was in the overseas market. The marketing of iRiver America was mostly spent on PR and brand partnerships, featuring celebrities such as Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg. Its global market share overall was 14.1% in 2003, while Apple led with 21.6%. 1 position in the global market of flash players. The company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod: the iHP-300 followed by the H300.
It had also completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. A year later, it was first to market with 512 MB and 1 GB flash players with its iFP-500 "Masterpiece" player. By the end of the year, iRiver had already gained as much as 20% of the domestic market and was steadily increasing popularity in foreign markets. This led to the release of their first DAP product, the iFP-100 "Prism" - named as such because of its distinctive shape designed by its design firm partner, INNO Design. In 2002, iRiver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. iRiver was one of a number of South Korean companies who were dominating the worldwide MP3 industry in these early years.
By now, iRiver portable CD players had achieved high domestic popularity and were also popular elsewhere. iRiver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SONICblue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. The company's first iRiver product was the iMP-100, a portable CD player capable of decoding MP3 data files on CDs, released in November 2000. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, while keeping R&D in-house. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae-Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues.