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iriver (formerly iRiver) Co., Ltd. makes portable digital audio players. They typically include USB mass storage, or the Media Transfer Protocol, multiple codecs, FM tuners, recording capabilities, and upgradeable firmware. more...

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The Clix, a flash based player with up to 2GB of built-in capacity, is currently iriver's flagship product; it weighs 2.5 ounces, boasts a 2.2-inch screen and can play music, video and games. Microsoft helped develop, test and market this player and specified upgrades to its chips and graphics engine.

Headquartered in Seoul, iriver is the consumer electronics marketing arm of ReignCom, a company founded in 1999 by seven former Samsung executives. ReignCom announced in May, 2006 that it would adjust its focus toward handheld mobile gaming. It has also reported sluggish sales for its music player business, including a loss of 35.58 billion won (US$36.68 million) in 2005, compared with a net profit of 43.46 billion won in 2004. ReignCom also owns the Korean-language Yurion and Funcake entertainment services.

Company Profile

In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, located in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, CA, while keeping R&D in-house.

Their first iriver product was the iMP-100, a portable CD player capable of decoding MP3 data files on CDs, released in November, 2000. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SonicBlue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. Iriver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world, before jumping to other types of players. The company rose to the No. 1 position in the global market, before being displaced by the iPod's introduction.

In 2002, iriver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. Best Buy chain. A year later, it was first to market with 512MB and 1GB players and completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. By this time, the company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products.

iriver adopted a new marketing strategy in 2005, attempting to grab mindshare from Apple. It referred to the U10 flash player as the thumb thing. This referred to users controlling their MP3 devices with their thumbs, just as they do their cell phones and text messaging devices.

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