What can your engineer background mean for your company?

I can say that I am an engineer-turned entrepreneur.  My knowledge of technology does good to my business and customers at least in one way I think: I am not swayed by sweet promises and flatteries of engineers about the technologies they develop -- I have an eye for real technologies, real innovations, thus we are able to provide technologies that work.

Please introduce your management philosophy.

My management philosophy is ’be honest with customers’.  I lament the current CCTV camera market situation where some companies are only interested in price competition, which keeps driving the price down to an unimaginable level and thus disrupting the market.  I am not interested in making flimsy products and disguising them as quality products with cheaper price to sell them off easily and beat competition.  I want to make quality, innovative products that can improve the lives of the worlds consumers, now and for generations to come, and provide the products at a proper price.  At Vision Hi-Tech, we strive to maintain our utmost commitment to quality and customer satisfaction in everything we do.  Preserving the high standards of quality, I believe, is being honest with customers by demonstrating that we only provide what we promise.

What is Vision Hi-Tech’s key strength over your competitors?

Strict quality control is our key strength.  We believe a product should never be sold if it has not been carefully manufactured and tested thoroughly with satisfactory results, as Sakichi Toyoda, Founder of Toyota Industries, once commented.

All of our products go through many quality review processes before they are finally released to the market.  These processes take a long time and great efforts, so sometimes we risk losing an opportunity to introduce products before our competitors do.  But our belief is our ‘quality-first policy’ will pay off and is the only way to get customer satisfaction and royalty.  That’s why quality is viewed as the lifeline of our company and receives the utmost priority as a management task.

Looking back on 2007, what kind of happenings and activities went on in Vision Hi-Tech?

Last year, our R&D spending hit a record US$2 million.  It is not a small amount for an SME, but we were willing to increase our R&D investment to preoccupy the market with products of superior quality and appealing design.  As a result, we were able to produce new products including DVRs, day & night cameras and professional-grade premium cameras that satisfied our expectations and made our customers happy again.

Where do you think the video surveillance technology is headed?

To be honest, it’s hard to say for sure where the video surveillance technology is headed because of the protean character of technology.  However, the video surveillance technology would definitely go toward IP and ultimately be provided as part of a bigger solution integrating other security technologies.  I think it will take another 20 or 30 years.

And demand for better image quality will increase as CCTV cameras play a pivotal role in solving crimes.  Therefore, I think for IP cameras, the future of CCTV cameras, JPEG codec will be used for still images and MPEG 4 or H.264 will be used for moving images.

Jeanny Lim is Editor-in-Chief of SecurityWorld INT’L.  Send your comments to swied@infothe.com.

For more information, please send your e-mails to swm@infothe.com.

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