Steljes nets exclusive product deal

Distributor Steljes has bagged exclusive rights to distribute AVerMedia Technologies' visualisation products, five years after first hooking up with the Taiwanese vendor.

Steljes claimed that, having created a market for its products around the education sector, the distributor needed to protect the revenue streams it had worked hard to generate.

In January, the AVerVision SPC300 Visual Presenter was short-listed in the Primary and Secondary Hardware category at BETT 2008, the world’s biggest educational technology show.

Matt Jacks, Steljes category business manager for complementary products, said he was delighted to tie up the exclusive rights to AVerMedia.

“We have a special relationship with AVerVision and it is the only company with the full range of systems, from affordable to high-end systems,” he said.

“We have worked really hard to build up this market. We have been to schools and proved the concept. And now people are beginning to realise the potential it has, so I’m blowed if I will let someone else take all the glory.”
The appeal of the products is that they use CMOS chips ­ the same as those used in digital cameras ­ to capture an image and broadcast it simultaneously. This means a teacher can take non-digital content and display it on a range of media, such as plasma screens.

“If a teacher wants to show off young Johnny’s painting as an example of best practice to the rest of the class, it is easy,” explained Jacks.

The AVerVisual product set ranges in trade price from £250 to £1,000. The margins available should be around 20 to 35 per cent, promised Jacks.

He envisaged good growth in the education market, but predicted that training and the health sector could be lucrative targets.

J’Nel Metherell, marketing manager at AVerMedia, said: “This has been the culmination of more than five years of hard work at both reseller and end-user level in developing the awareness and benefits of the use of visualisers in education.”