Point of View BV Declares Bankruptcy, But Holding Company Vows to Come Back
by Anton Shilov on November 28, 2016 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Point of View
Shipments of discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs have shrunk by nearly two times since 2007 and competition between vendors intensified in the recent years. As a result, some companies have tried to diversify their business while others have had to leave. Last week Point of View BV, which was a known supplier of graphics adapters in Europe (particularly last decade), was declared bankrupt by the court in Oost-Brabant in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the owner of the brand claims that the holding company Point of View Holding BV is still operational and plots its return.
Point of View was established in 1994 with a purpose to sell various devices including graphics cards under a singular brand. The company got rather famous in 2000s, particularly for its inexpensive NVIDIA GeForce adapters available widely across Europe. As the market of graphics add-in-boards (AIBs) contracted and the competition intensified in 2010s, Point of View lost its market share and attempted to diversify its business by adding media tablets, mobile accessories and even drones to its product family. While the company kept selling video cards, its lineup of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 900-series adapters shrank to only five products (versus 19 members of the GeForce GTX 600-series family several years ago). Meanwhile, sales of tablets have been either declining or stagnating for years and despite low prices (enabled by Intel’s incentives and subsidies to China-based manufacturers) Point of View never got popular. After facing multiple problems, Point of View BV filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and this week the court in Oost-Brabandt declared it insolvent.
On Friday, Bjørn Solli, CEO of Point of View, told us that the brand is not fading into oblivion. Point of View Holding BV, the parent company, owns multiple business entities, including Point of View BV, Point of View International BV, Point of View Asia Corp Ltd., Point of View US LLC and others. To date, only Point of View BV has been declared bankrupt, which is why it cannot continue operations and for now, we are not going to see any new graphics cards carrying the brand either in Europe or in the U.S. Right now, the company still sells add-in graphics boards in Latin America, whereas its Mobii Supply Partner BV division is focused on accessories for mobile devices. Nonetheless, the chief executive of Point of View hopes that eventually his company will return to the market of graphics cards “when the time is right.”
“We will do what we can to be back to the European market,” said Bjørn Solli. “It will be with diversified products. We have many ideas! And it will not take long.”
Unfortunately, to date the company has not come up with any RMA solutions for owners of its existing products, but the CEO promised to provide an update on the matter next week.
Sources: FaillissementsDossier.nl, Point of View, TechPowerUp.
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Death666Angel - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
"shrunk by nearly two times"That doesn't mean anything. I guess you mean to say it's half now compared to 2007?
sorten - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
I was wondering the same. What would it mean if it "shrank by one time?" Would it be zero at that point? Or would it be at 50%? And then shrinking a second time would drop it to 25%?HomeworldFound - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
Point of View in Europe is one of those brands that everyone scrolls past and fails to notice. People ask if anyone has tried their products and never get an answer. People wonder if they're worth it, what the noise is like, what the warranty return is like... most of them end up with a popular brand instead.Alexvrb - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
At least over there you've heard of them. When I saw the headline I read it as "company you've never heard of goes bankrupt" but I did skim enough of the article to learn who they are, uh, were.Death666Angel - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
They were always the cheapest option at my local hardware guy. I bought a Geforce 2 TI, a 4 MX440 and my brother had a Geforce 3 TI 200 made by PoV. They were okay if you needed to save the 10 - 20€ it cost to get something with reviews from MSI, Asus or the like. And at the time we dealt with single slot cooling solutions for graphics cards that used a few dozen watts from the PCIe or AGP slot. But once we started getting cards with external power connectors, decent cooling solutions were in higher demand for most people.Philotech - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
Hey, I (living in Germany) even got an 8" tablet made by them. Really on the cheap, EUR 65 which, using standard conversion rates in the IT sector and discounting tax, would equal maybe USD 50. It's not a bad tablet, though hampered by one of these slow Intel Atom CPUs and just 1 GB of RAM...Michael Bay - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
"19 members of the GeForce GTX 600-series family" doesn`t look like a winning strategy. You`ll only get a lot of SKUs sitting in the warehouse unsold.Meteor2 - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
'“We will do what we can to be back to the European market,” said Bjørn Solli. “It will be with diversified products. We have many ideas! And it will not take long.”'--because that worked so well first time round. Ignore your core products at your peril.
Gothmoth - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
well from all the GPU companys POV is the last interesting to me.i will not miss them.
what we really need is another big player that produced GPU´s not more companys who build all the same cards.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
The only GPU competition in the PC space is from Intel which is to say there really isn't competition. The cost barriers are too high for startups to overcome these days and risk-adverse large corporations are uninterested in making the investments to enter that market. Maybe one of the ARM companies out there will dabble in the PC GPU space, but even that seems highly unlikely when they can just play a waiting game to see what happens to x86 as they continue to sell phone/tablet SOCs.