Philips perseveres with flat-panel ads

Philips is persisting with a planned #175,000 advertising campaign to promote its latest flat-panel monitor in the UK, despite a massive product shortage and a huge backlog of orders.

The Philips Brilliance 151 AX was launched in July, but massive global demand has resulted in only a trickle of products entering the UK. Orders in the channel have built up and the vendor estimates it will be at least one month before the backlog is cleared. Philips will launch the advertising campaign to promote the product in November.

David Quinn, Philips product manager at distributor Metrologie, said: 'We thought we would have had the monitors in by now but Philips keeps changing the delivery time. It looks as though it will be the end of October at the earliest.'

Quinn denied resellers were upset by delays in delivery of the monitor, which at around #500 is one of the lowest priced thin film transistor (TFT) monitors on the market. 'Because it is so competitively priced, customers are waiting for it rather than going somewhere else,' he said.

The price point of the monitor has hit other TFT monitor vendors. Sally Mullis, Options brand manager at IBM UK, said: 'It absolutely kills us at that price.'

Peter Wyatt, marketing manager for monitors at Philips, admitted the vendor had under-estimated demand, but denied it was selling the product at below cost. 'We are making a profit on it and we don't sell products at a loss. The idea is to develop this market. Philips wouldn't be advertising on such a large scale if it couldn't deliver the product,' he said.

The Philips monitor is developed and manufactured in Japan by Hosiden, in which Philips took an 80 per cent stake earlier this year.