Small&Solid - TELE-satellite International Magazine

COMPANY REPORT
TV Made in
Germany
Alexander Wiese
There are only a few TV manufacturers
left in Germany. Production has been outsourced
to other countries for quite some time
now. The idea then would be to find a niche
that other manufacturers haven’t caught on
to yet. TechniSat found just that and has
been producing modern flat-screen LCD TV’s
since 2005. But what differentiates these
units from other manufacturer’s models? We
wanted to know so we took a road trip to the
city of Stassfurt in the province of Saxony-
Anhalt in Germany to find out.
When Stassfurt was still part of East Germany,
it was known as home for the manufacture
of TV and radio receivers marketed
under the name RFT. After German reunification
in 1989, the company went through several
different owners before being acquired
by the TechniSat Group in 1998 and renaming
the company TechniSat Teledigital AG.
From the more than 1000 employees that
existed back in the days of East Germany,
only 40 employees are left over. But in 2005,
when production started on flat-screen LCD
TV’s, the employee count rose to 170. This
year there are 220 and Stefan Koen, Sales
Executive, told us, “We are already considering
additional employees.”
TechniSat Teledigital AG
52 TELE-satellite & Broadband — 08-09/2007 — www.TELE-satellite.com
Production has increased by 70% in just a
few years. It is a company that is constantly
growing, and that with stiffer and stiffer competition.
How does TechniSat do it?
Plant Manager Elisabeth Engel lets us in on
the secret: “Our magic word is Multi-tuner”,
and Stefan Koen continues, “Our competition
does not offer the functions of a multi-tuner.”
What is a multi-tuner? Very simply, it takes
all the different transmission variants and
combines them into one box. The TechniSat
▲
flat-screen LCD TV’s therefore don’t need any
other type of set top box. Everything is integrated:
the TV’s contain tuners for all kinds
of signals from DVB-S (satellite), DVB-T (Terrestrial),
DVB-C (cable) all the way to analog.
There’s even an FM tuner for listening to the
radio. And the best part: every channel can
be set as desired.
To complete the all-in-one palette, the
flat-screen LCD TV’s also come integrated
with automatic channel list updates as well
Elisabeth Engel, Plant Manager, and Stefan Koen, Sales
Executive, in front of TechniSat’s
administration building in Stassfurt