Analysis for Barco Case - Market and Competitive Position

Barco's general strategy?

As a small company, Barco generally compete by carving out a market on the basis of its R&D strength and product quality. They focus on top-of-the-line products in niche markets. The general strategy contains three elements: first, leadership in complementary niche market; Second, strong commission in R&D; Third, expand its international presence in sales, product development and production.

Market and competitive position

Barco N.V. was one of the top three worldwide manufacturers in each of its product lines: automated production control systems, graphic arts, computer-aided design, and industrial projection. BPS organization is divisionalization for projectors. BPS has developed three lines of projectors of video, data, and graphics. They use scan rate to segment its market. By 1989, they are well established in a variety of entertainment, training, and presentation market. The worldwide market for projectors was expected to grow 8.5% per year. Graphics has the highest growth potential, Unites States and western Europe composed the most of market. BPS was the acknowledged technological leader in the high end. Barco's projectors had a dealer reputation for the highest quality final image and excellent reliability once fully installed.

BPS product line evolution

Move from video-only data project, BPS developed its graphic projectors to handle input from CAD/CAM sources, which required upgrading a data projector's scanning frequency to 64Khz and above. Their newest line of graphics projectors has a scan range of 16kHZ to 74kHZ above. BG400 was the scanning up to 72kHZ and was priced at $25,000. It moves towards the digitally controlled projectors BD700 which to be priced at $16,000. The next one could be the digital graphics projector BG700. There is also a possible development