Apex DVD Players

Apex DVD Players, whats the real cost of a really really cheap

Apexs furious rise to prominence in 1999 was fueled by popular consumer demand for cheap DVD players. This Walnut California based consumer electronics company was first to offer a DVD player for under $200. Not only was it cheap but it was also one of the first that employed recently mass produced processors capable of reading MP3 encoding, enabling compressed playback, they even had a built in slideshow image viewer. These features were new to anything below $500 so its no wonder many peoples first DVD Player was an Apex.
After securing a deal with Circuit City and soon other retail chains Apex put mass quantities of their product onto store shelves and their sub $200 DVD players could barely be kept in stock. Apexs rise set new standards in low cost consumer electronics which reverberated through the industry as a whole, enough to garner Apex recognition by Time magazine in 2002 among the top 15 most influential businesses of the year. In the Christmas season of 2004 it was Apex that made history with another historic low in DVD player pricing, putting them onto Wal-Mart shelves at $39. Since consumer electronics retailers Circuit City and Best Buy have stopped selling the discount brand, today Apex is sold at Wall-Mart as well as unexpected locations like drug and grocery stores.

Their quick rise prominence has seen Apex branch into other areas where they broker the manufacture of other popular entertainment technologies. High Definition LCD panel televisions, DVD Recorders, full and mid-size console DVD players, TFT LCD Screen Portable DVD Players and portable media players have all found their way into the Apex product lines. The company itself might be seen as a distinctly American made success story but one with plot twists that might be found in episodes of the Sopranos. Founded in 1997 David Ji and Ancle Hsu started the company with the intention of cranking out cheap consumer electronics using the time honored method of lower profit margins per unit coupled with lower production costs. One of the more dubious sides of Apexs business strategy was to simply not pay for costly patents required for the production of DVD players. The company is still embroiled in legal battles with various competing manufacturers who hold patents that Apex has infringed upon, like Sony and Philips but also with trade groups who charge that Apex is involved in unfair business practices by undercutting prices. Apex has managed to thwart the legal trouble by keeping litigation against them tied up in courts. In Dec 2004 their practices caught up with them in a big way, David Ji was arrested in China for failing to pay a Chinese manufacturer called Sichuan Changhong Electric Appliance Co for making televisions under the Apex name. Authorities charge that Apex owes the Chinese manufacturer of their products hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Apex electronics is not really a manufacturer at all. Theyre more of a manufacturing broker, their name plate goes on equipment made at various Chinese factories, and sold at big box stores like Wall-Mart. When buying electronics from a company with no research and development, no customer support, no history nor stake in their reputation or product line and contracts labor it should come as no surprise that youre buying the lowest quality possible. Check the Better Business Bureau on Apex to for proof their equipment is the next best thing to garbage. Since the out- of-box-into-landfill cycle is accelerated when the Apex name is glued to the front please find out what your local municipality does about recycling electronics components if you plan to buy Apex, youll need that information sooner than you think. For more information just Google Apex sucks and set aside lots of time to read the horror stories from real customers.

Please learn to recycle old consumer electronics.