Iriver
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Formerly called
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iRiver |
|---|---|
| Division | |
| Industry | Consumer electronics |
| Founded | 1999 |
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Number of locations
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3 (2016) |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Parent | iriver Inc |
| Website | iriver.com |
iriver is a consumer electronics company headquartered in South Korea and widely known for its digital audio players and other portable media devices.
The company is a brand and marketing division of iriver Inc, a South Korean electronics and entertainment company founded in 1999 by seven former Samsung executives.
South Korean private equity firm Vogo Fund has held a major stake in iriver from 2007 to 2014, working to improve the company's prospects as its MP3 player business has dwindled.
Iriver was sold to SK Telecom in 2014.
In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae-Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, located in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, while keeping R&D in-house.
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. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SonicBlue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. Iriver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world, before jumping to other types of players. The company rose to the No. 1 position in the global market, before being displaced by the iPod's introduction.
In 2002, iriver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. Best Buy chain. A year later, it was first to market with 512 MB and 1 GB players, and completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. By that time, the company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products.
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Wikipedia