Issue #47 - March 2001
New Products - Product Improvements
Our Millennium Preamp Module, the Goldmund A20 Module, is now available
We told you last month about this new revision of our preamps module. We will have this new module for upgrades sale by the end of March and the first preamps with the new module should start shipping in April. Quite a fast work, isn’t it ?
The Eidos 38 is coming !
We promised you a picture for this newsletter. It will be for the next one, sorry. But we had to revise drastically the internal mechanics to benefit of a recent improvement. So, be patient.
Marketing News
Biggest Months ever for Goldmund in February and March 2001
With a strong return of our business in Far East and the good economical climate we had in 2000, we were quite concerned to see the market slowing down and the economy plunge in 2001 first quarter.
And surprise ! Just the opposite happened for us. Without any special effort on our part except for the Millennium (most of our new products for this year are due later in the year), we successively registered an absolute record in sales in February and it seems March will be even better. Progression over last year is above 30% and, by modesty, we have difficulties understanding the real reasons.
Best guess is the remarkable product improvements Goldmund introduced during the last 6 months, thanks to our team of young engineers Sebastien Benz and Raphael Pasche who improved (without us telling you) something like 15 of our products to make them sound better, to make them more reliable and easier to manufacture. It is also probably the result of the very strong quality policy applied by Lorenzo Mandelli which drastically dropped the number of products flaws during our manufacturing process (first month defects dropped over last year by a factor of 3).
With better products and a better reliability, our customers are happier and they buy more Goldmund…
Anyhow, to all our faithful customers, dealers and distributors, thank you to have pushed us so much to improve.
Hieu Lam is our first nominee to the 2001 Goldmund Excellence Award
We introduced recently the Goldmund Excellence Award to celebrate the members of our team, either in-house or external, who have shown exceptional results.
The first diploma to be given to one of our workers team is going to Hieu Lam who is in charge, for a few months, of our Epilogue Speakers assembly. By its extreme care, unstoppable attention and extreme concentration, Hieu is making the Goldmund most prestigious speakers the perfect product that our customer deserve. He is the perfect example of what the Goldmund high skill worker may be, fully responsible of a product line and its quality. Thank you, Hieu and congratulations.
Building Series of Millennium is seriously hampering our production facilities
We are suffering these days of tremendous delays in some of our production lines.
We may have accused the scarcity in parts (very true, by the way, some components like high precision Minimelf resistors being literally unreachable these days), we may have accused the good ski life we have in Switzerland…
But to tell you the truth, the real reason of our delays these days is that we have to assemble those crazy Millennium amps !
That new baby is taking our space and assembly time like no other products ever did before.
Making a single Millennium takes more than a week of assembly for an experienced worker.
We make them 10 by 10 and have dedicated some of our best people to their manufacturing, so those are not available for the other products anymore, slowing down our processes.
Be patient. We believe the Millennium fury should calm down soon, the new people we are training will become more efficient and everything will be back to normal.
Pardon our success..
