Rebecca Day

Top-tier LED bulb suppliers are exploiting energy rebates from local utilities to overcome retail price barriers as they try to win consumer loyalty after the final phase of the transition to energy-efficient bulbs took effect Jan. 1 under the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007. Executives from Cree and Philips told us that rebates offered at retailers by select utilities have brought prices down to under $5 in some cases. Rebates vary widely by geography, however, with California and the Northeast having some of the more progressive utilities, they said.

Savant plans to grow its dealer base in a “calculated fashion” but not related to its new lower cost Smart Series that will begin installation March 17, Tim McInerney, Savant director-product management, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The mid-market Smart offering, beginning at $1,000 per room, “gives our new and existing integrators a full array of solutions to address a broad range of consumers,” McInerney said. The Smart Series allows the company to bring its software-based product to a broader market, falling between Savant’s luxury-level Pro series and broader market entry-level products from other companies, McInerney said. The Smart Host is the foundation of the Smart series and along with Savant software, offers control of lighting, HVAC, entertainment and other home electronics, the company said. On how Savant dealers will position the two systems and qualify customers for one or the other, McInerney said dealers will look at the magnitude of a project including size, scale and features that a homeowner wants. A Smart series could serve a four-zone residence compared with a 20-zone home that would be best served by the more robust Pro system, he said. Customers who want to switch “a great many” HDMI video devices and have video tiling -- a Savant feature that enables customers to switch up to 24 video sources and show from one to nine video windows on a display at once -- would likely be a Pro system customer, he said. According to a news release, complete Savant Smart Series packages start at $1,599 suggested retail price, including the $799 Smart Host, remote and controller. The system will be sold through Savant’s network of 1,500 integrators in 35 countries, the company said. The Smart Series rollout announcement was roughly a month after Savant announced that former Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch had been tapped as CEO of Savant, where Lynch said he would leverage his consumer technology, brand and marketing skills to “take a proven and established home automation technology company to the mass market” (CED Jan 29 p1). Lynch said then he was “familiar with how to democratize technology.”

Q4 sales at Target started off better than expected for the first three weeks of the holiday season, but shifted to “meaningfully softer results” following the Dec. 19 announcement that millions of credit cards had been compromised in the breach that affected in-store purchases in the U.S., said CEO Gregg Steinhafel on an earnings call Wednesday. Q4 comp sales dropped 2.5 percent, which aligned with guidance the company gave in January, he said.

Sprint will “break into the premium audio scene” with a Bluetooth wireless speaker system called Onyx Studio, made by Harman Kardon, that will be sold exclusively in the U.S. through Sprint stores, Sprint said Monday. Nearly half of mobile phone owners listen to music services on their device, said Sprint, citing data from Pew Research Center, and Harman and Sprint want to capitalize on the trend.

Control4 is looking to “enhance our dealer footprint,” and work with “larger and more sophisticated dealers” while expanding the mainstream consumer products its dealers offer, said the 10-K report it filed with the SEC Friday. Currently, none of the company’s 3,000-plus dealers accounts for more than 5 percent of Control4 revenue, it said. The top 100 dealers represented 22 percent of Control4 revenue in 2013, it said. There’s a “finite” number of dealers qualified to handle the technical requirements of a home automation system, Control4 said.

A federal court has ordered lighting manufacturer Lights of America (LOA) to pay more than $21 million for overstating the light output and life expectancy of its LED bulbs, according to the FTC, which in September 2010 sued LOA and its owners Usman Vakil and Farooq Vakil for “misleading consumers by exaggerating the performance” of its LED bulbs. The FTC charged that LOA violated federal law on packaging and in brochures and falsely compared the brightness of its LED bulbs with that of other light bulbs. In September, the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., found the defendants liable for deceptive marketing. The defendants initially claimed their LED lamps had a 30,000-hour life and lasted “15 times longer than 2,000 hour incandescent bulbs,” according to the FTC. The defendants revised those claims downward several times, including stating that their LED lamps had a 12,000-hour life and lasted “6 times longer than 2,000 hour incandescent bulbs.” Documents showed that none of the tested LED bulbs lasted beyond a few thousand hours, the FTC said. In tests, three lamp models reached the end of their useful lives within the 961-hour test period, according to documents. LOA’s gross revenue for its Lifetime lamps through August 2009, when it reduced its 30,000-hour claim to 20,000 hours, was roughly $17.9 million, according to court documents. The company’s revenue for the 20,000-hour claim period was $3 million, and gross revenue for lamps sold under the 12,000-15,000-hour lifetime claim was $251,000, court papers show. Most of the $21 million penalty will be available for refunds to consumers, the FTC said. A court order against LOA permanently prohibits the defendants from misrepresenting material facts about lighting products, from misrepresenting light output or brightness in lumens, light output comparisons to other products, product lifetime, energy costs, energy savings and energy consumption “or the ability to produce a desired energy-related effect.” The majority of LED lamps at issue were manufactured at LOA’s facility in Shanghai, papers said. LOA sells its LED lamps through retailers in the U.S. and Canada including Walmart, Sam’s Club, Ace Hardware, Costco, Kroger, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Do it Best, Menards, Meijer, Tru Serve, Fred Meyer, Ralphs and Food 4 Less. LOA lamps are also sold under the Everyday Living brand, according to LOA’s website. A banner on the LOA website Thursday said the site is “under construction” and “specifications subject to change.”

Walmart will respond to a Q4 drop in comp sales with “price investment,” “enhanced service” and an acceleration of its small store rollout, said CEO Doug McMillon on the company’s earnings call Thursday. Net sales grew $1.8 billion to $128.8 billion, or 1.4 percent, for the 14 weeks ended Jan. 31, with comp store sales down 0.4 percent. Traffic slipped 1.7 percent while tickets were up 1.3 percent, according to Walmart U.S. CEO Bill Simon.

JVC/Kenwood is incorporating CSR’s aptX codec into 13 infotainment products this year, the first of a “series” of announcements in the automotive space, Thomas Carmody, head of connectivity marketing for CSR, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The move into car entertainment comes at a time when 70 percent of Android handsets have an aptX encoder on board, Carmody said. Apple hasn’t incorporated aptX into the iPhone “yet,” Carmody said hopefully, noting that the MacBook supports aptX. For car makers, the high penetration aptX-enabled handsets from Samsung, Motorola, HTC and Sony means consumers can experience “CD-like audio” from their smartphones over Bluetooth in their vehicles, Carmody said. With the CD player disappearing from the dash, high-quality audio is disappearing from the driver experience, and aptX helps boost sound quality over Bluetooth, he said. The addition of aptX for the rear passengers enables wireless headset use with low latency compared with the standard Bluetooth specification, so users won’t experience lip sync issues with movies or lags between button presses during game play, Carmody said. Agreements with automotive OEMs are in the pipeline, he said, and CSR is shooting for having the technology as a factory feature by the 2016 model year.

Garmin Q4 revenue slipped 1 percent to $760 million, as growth in fitness, aviation and marine weren’t enough to offset a 12 percent decline in the automotive/mobile segment, the company said on an earnings call Wednesday. Automotive/mobile revenue dropped to $382 million in the quarter, it said. In other CE segments, outdoor revenue grew 7 percent year over year to $127 million in Q4, and fitness grew 14 percent to $119 million, the company said. Aviation grew 25 and marine 13 percent, it said.

CE industry retail veterans mourned the news Tuesday that 60-year-old regional chain American TV & Appliance will shutter its stores after a going-out-of-business sale that begins Thursday. The 10-store retailer said Monday in a news release that it’s “going out of business forever.” CEO Doug Reuhl called the closing a “sad moment,” attributing the closing to “an unforgiving economy,” saying “the last five years have been very difficult for our industries.” In addition to CE, American sold furniture, mattresses and appliances, a category expansion that other retailers such as h.h. gregg have adopted to offset declining video margins.