See and hear your way clear

Consumer categories are throwing up new concepts for resellers to consider, says Mark Needham

As a retail distributor in the UK, a market where consumer spending will continue to be tight this year, our company is focusing on two areas of growth.

The first is wearable computing which monitors fitness, health, activity or other bodily functions.

TechMarketView analyst Richard Holway has been writing about wearable computing for several years, and he recently declared 2014 the year of this technology.

"Indeed it will probably be earlier," he wrote. In my view, wearable computing has started already.

We distribute Fitbit, a wearable activity monitor that has been selling in the UK since January 2012. It did well in 2012 and we think sales in 2013 are clearly going to be double those of last year.

Nike started selling the Fuelband in Europe last spring and Garmin has been selling its fitness watches through sports and camping outlets. This will shortly be matched by products from TomTom.

This year will see competitor products from Withings, Jawbone, new players such as Misfit, and even the possibility of an Apple iWatch.

As Holway has said, the killer application is health. He writes: "It will start with the very healthy wanting to use it while jogging, cycling, hiking, et cetera. But it will soon be deployed for the ill or old too – a huge market."

The second area of growth we see involves improving sound on the UK's television sets.

Over the past 10 years, most people I know bought a flatscreen TV, or if they were early adopters who already had a flatscreen TV, they have since bought a larger, thinner one.

Now that many of us have a bigger, better TV picture, TV sales will return to the replacement cycle, or sales to new households.

Unfortunately, the sound quality of flatscreen TV is poor. This not only affects concerts or music videos; as TV dramas get more involved you can miss the point of an entire episode if you do not hear a few vital lines of dialogue.

I think that one of the reasons Scandinavian dramas such as The Killing and Borgen have been so popular is that nowadays it is often easier to understand a complex plot if there are subtitles.

New speaker systems, such as the Orbitsound brand, are being launched to improve TV sound quality. Cinema sound, surround sound, virtual surround sound are names for a category nobody has named exactly, but which definitely fills a consumer need.

Unlike many other growth areas,these product categories will increase the size of the overall consumer electronics market – and ultimately the economy.

When customers buy a TV sound system or a health monitor they are buying something new – not something which replaces a previous item they used to buy.

Mark Needham is chairman of Widget UK