Owner of Rotel Peter Kao was in town yesterday with his International Sales Director Daren Orth and his distributor for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia Henry Loh, the Director of Sales and Operations of The Experts Group, to visit The Experts Sound showroom in Gardens Mall, Kuala Lumpur, and also to visit some Rotel dealers.
Chatting with Peter Kao over a dim sum lunch, I discovered many things about Rotel that I didn’t know previously.
I always thought Rotel was a Japanese-owned company. It turns out that it is actually a Taiwanese company. Rotel was started by Peter Kao’s granduncle Tachikawa in 1961 in Tokyo. Tachikawa was actually a Chinese from Taiwan who migrated to Japan and took on a Japanese name.
Bear in mind that Taiwan was a Japanese colony till it was returned to China when World War 2 ended.
I also discovered that before Rotel was launched Tachikawa’s company did OEM work for Philips.
On the high-end MICHI range, Peter Kao explained that when Rotel decided to explore the high-end market, there was a feeling that nobody would buy an expensive Rotel. So they decided to come up with a new name. MICHI in Japanese means ‘The Way’.
The casing design was done by a European company to make it look simple, stylish and modern.
I asked him about using a British company to voice Rotel products as I remembered Rotel advertisements mentioning they they were voiced in UK for the British sound. He said voicing is now done in-house.
When MICHI was launched, its sales amounted to 17 per cent of total sales. Now it’s hitting 27 per cent of total sales. Sales of MICHI components picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mk 2 versions of some MICHI products have been launched and these include the P5 Series 2 preamp, the X3 Series 2 and X5 Series 2 integrated amps.
I also discovered that Rotel makes a lot of their own components and even winds their own transformers.
Peter Kao also revealed that Rotel and MICHI have switched to using ESS Sabre chips from AKM chips.
He said they get a lot of requests from their customers and they are already working on one component — a MICHI CD player, which is still a work in progress.
Previously Rotel products were made in Japan, but now manufacturing has been relocated to Zhuhai, Guangdong Province in China where they have their own factory.
