Forget about the swimming, basketball or even rowing, the gold medal winning performances are coming not from the Birds Nest in Beijing but rather from the retail floor in places like Nunawading.
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Just prior to the Olympics, we had Sony and their Bravia/PS3 promotion, which according to the company resulted in the purchase of some 35,000 LCD TV’s just prior to the start of the 2008 Olympic Games.
And over the past 2 weeks, vendors such as Panasonic have been selling flat screen TV’s at a rate that would make even the most hardened retail cynic blush.
According to Panasonic MD Steve Rust, TV sales have gone through the roof.
“We’ve had growth figures exceeding 100 per cent over the past month”, says Rust, adding that on top of those figures, “Blu-ray players and other TV peripherals have been at near sell-out levels for the past 6 weeks”.
Another growth spurt has come from the digital camera sector, which Rust admits, he “can’t explain why”.
Regardless, from the retail side of things, Harvey Norman supremo Gerry Harvey says his stores have been selling LCD and Plasma panels hand over fist.
“Our store are reporting 10 to 30 per cent growth ob average- and it’s all coming from TV sales”, says Harvey, adding that, “during the Olympics, sales of just about everything is up”.
Will this Olympic-driven TV boom continue until years end? Well Panasonic’s Rust is optimistic and says that “after the Olympics you have the NRL finals, the AFL finals and then Christmas, which will all deliver good TV sales results for us”.
As for Gerry Harvey, his view is a bit more circumspect. “It will be dead after the games are over”, he says, although he does agree that Christmas may offer a bit of sales lift.
Buts it’s the Olympics that are giving the gold-medal winning performances as Harvey notes that, “sales of everything are up, up, up now”.
So perhaps a new sport at the 2012 London Olympics will be ‘Flat Panel TV Selling’.
