Rebecca Day

Consumers spent $204.5 billion online Nov. 1-Dec. 31, an 8.5% bump from 2020, amid inflation and billions of out-of-stock messages, said Adobe in its final 2021 e-commerce holiday sales season report Wednesday. December’s price increases marked the 19th consecutive month of year-on-year online inflation, following the record high of November 2021, when online prices increased 3.5% from November 2020, it said.

Voxx fiscal Q3 revenue fell short year on year, as several OEM customers temporarily halted production due to component and chip shortages, said CEO Pat Lavelle on a call Tuesday for the quarter ended Nov. 30. Revenue was $191.9 million, down nearly 5%, Voxx reported Monday.

A “mentor” with a passion for audio and dedication to success was how two former Denon America colleagues will remember Robert Heiblim, they told us Monday. Heiblim died Friday from complications of lung cancer (see 2201070053).

SVS Sound is planning its first in-wall subwoofer and its first product to be sold exclusively through authorized dealers, CEO Gary Yacoubian told Consumer Electronics Daily via a Zoom call from the company’s CES suite at the Venetian Thursday.

Samsung CEO Jong-Hee Han cited the importance of sustainability initiatives, “purposeful partnerships,” and customizable and connected technologies, in his pre-CES keynote Tuesday from the Venetian's Palazzo Ballroom.

The COVID-19 omicron variant will bring “uncertainty” to the economy in 2022, and could contribute to inflation, but it's “unlikely to cause widespread shutdowns or slowdowns” due to its “relatively mild” effects for fully vaccinated individuals, said National Retail Federation Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz Wednesday. Each successive COVID-19 variant has slowed the economy, but “the degree of slowdown has been less” with each one, he noted.

Sharp is planning to bring higher-end TV models to the U.S. market under the Aquos brand, after announcing Tuesday a line of mainstream 4K and HD Roku TVs for its 2022 return to this country, Sharp Home Electronics President Jim Sanduski emailed Tuesday. The Japanese electronics firm hoped to return to the U.S. market with its own high-end TVs in 2019 but scrapped plans (see 1910090016) when it couldn’t meet a holiday season deadline. Sharp’s initial focus in 2022 is on mainstream models in small, medium and large screen sizes, he said. Sharp chose Roku’s operating system for its smart TV platform in the U.S. (see 2201030051) due to its No. 1 market share and marketing partnership opportunities, Sanduski said. The agreement isn’t exclusive, and Sharp markets Android TVs in other parts of the world, but its focus for the U.S. is on Roku TV, he said. The mid- to large-size Roku TVs are being assembled in Mexico by Foxconn, which owns two-thirds of Sharp; the smaller models are being imported from China, he said. Sharp isn’t exhibiting at CES 2022 “for a variety of reasons,” he said, but it plans to be on the CES show floor “at a future date.”

Jumbo screen sizes, updated motion technology, features for gamers and competitive pricing headlined TCL’s 2022 TV lineup on the company’s prerecorded CES news conference Tuesday. TCL is working with Pixelworks and other entertainment companies to define and deploy TrueCut Motion, a new “motion ecosystem,” said Aaron Dew, senior director-product development. Describing TrueCut Motion as “holistic,” Dew said it gives content creators a new tool to “dynamically use motion to better express style, to immerse viewers in stories and to elicit emotion."

Laser TV took center stage in Hisense’s virtual CES news conference, presented live from Mandalay Bay via a YouTube feed Tuesday.The Chinese brand will display 8K laser TV for the first time publicly this week at its Central Hall booth at CES, using a Hisense-developed 8K 120-Hz image-quality chip that can support 20,000 Mini-LED backlight partitions, said former LG executive David VanderWaal, recently named Hisense vice president-marketing, Americas.

ProSource is entering 2022 facing a series of challenges with a new chairman who has weathered the industry’s most difficult trials of the past. “Every serious business crisis that I’ve faced in my career has been different,” Walt Stinson, CEO of Denver-based ListenUp, told Consumer Electronics Daily after his election to a two-year term. “I’ve gotten better at managing crisis, but each crisis requires a great deal of adaptability and there are a lot of uncertainties,” he said.