Nov 27, 2001

Premier is the world's biggest camera supplier, it wants to stay on top for the future and it has the core technology to achieve that, the company's president Cliff Liu explained at a briefing for the foreign press in his headquarters this week.

While his company is still known to most in the business as "Premier Camera Corp." the recent name change into "Premier Image Technology Corporation" signifies that Premier will go beyond mere manufacturing of conventional and digital cameras into new fields of business but stay firmly with image processing as the core technology.

"At CeBIT in March we will introduce a new line of LCD projectors" Cliff Liu said.

Premier manufactures compact cameras with fixed focal length as well as seven zoom types starting with 35 mm and going to 52; 60; 90; 105; 125; 140 and 155mm.
Digital cameras include models with 1.3; 1.5; 2.1; 2.3; 3.3; and 4.1 MegPixels, which experts call impressive in a country where the rest of the industry still concentrates on digital cameras in the lower resolution ranges. The projector line includes LCD, DLP and LCOS types.

Because of the high production costs in Taiwan, most of manufacturing has been relocated to Mainland China and Malaysia. Established in 1983, and having set up a China operation as early as 1990, Premier is now constructing its second-phase expansion project after the completing the first phase of its "Camera City" in Sohang, Guandong province in South China. The main factory has 37,578 square meters of floor space on a total area, open for expansion of 122,000 square meters. The present workforce is 4,800, to reach 8,000.

Premier is ambitious to upgrad and expand this "Camera City", a project which needs a large injection of funds. Aiming to attract these funds from institutional investors, the company in November led a delegation of securities investment and trust companies, which have already invested in 10% of Premier's total share holdings, on a three-day visit to Foshan.

While the China plant concentrates on conventional photo cameras for the time being, Premier does not exclude the possibility of upgrading the production lines to produce digital camera products and transferring the Taiwan plant into a research center in the long run.

To form a vertical production system that provides self-sufficient components to camera production, Premier has brought a series of downstream parts and components firms to "Camery City", including a painting plant, a lens factory, a plastics injection factory, an SMT assembling plant and a camera assembly factory.
In the future, Premier predics a complete central-satellite system will be built in the special town. Since its new plant is scheduled to employ more than 8,000 workers, the Foshan city government has eagerly welcomed the company.

President Cliff Liu outlined his marketing goals as: to manufacturw according to customer's specification, to produce Japanese Quality at Chinese prices, while maintaining "Taiwanese Service" which he explained as reacting positively and rapidly to customers requirements. "Our people must answer all inquiries within 24 hours, or they cannot hope to stay in this company", he said.

Liu's final goal is transferring the production center to Foshan and to develop a plant in Taiwan into a research and development center for high-end products.

Once this project is completed, "Camera City" is expected to be able to produce more than 20 million cameras a year.

Besides exports, In the China domestic market Premier already has a might market penetration with sales rights for 15% of its output, 29 branches, 380 exclusive sales counters and 3,600 agents.