Mercantile & Gentry Sdn Bhd (M&G) is expected to make headway into the global digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio market, which is expected to hit RM228 billion over the next 10 years, with its range of Malaysia-made digital radios.

M&G has entered into a technical agreement with DIS Technology Holdings Bhd, which designed the hardware and software, while the outer design was undertaken by M&G. The production of the radio is outsourced to manufacturers in Penang.

M&G managing director Simon Marshall said it expected to sell by year-end between 20,000 and 50,000 units of its DAB radio, to be marketed under the M&G Audio brand mainly for the United Kingdom.

Speaking to reporters in Kuala Lumpur on May 24, Marshall said about 330 million digital radios were sold worldwide annually. He expected the UK to be the largest market for M&G Audio.

“Last Christmas, DAB radios were sold out. About 47% of all radios sold in the last quarter in the United Kingdom were digital radios. That’s about 1.5 million units and the projection for the industry is 6.8 million radios by 2008,” he said.

“We’re targeting primarily the United Kingdom for now in the high-end audiophile market, the upper 10%, and we expect to sell between 300,000 and 400,000 units there alone between now and 2008,” he added.

Marshall said Germany, Spain and Scandinavia were other markets that would embrace digital radios and he believed the rest of Europe would jump onto the digital bandwagon.

With Australia and South Africa slated to go for completely digital broadcasts in the near-future and with Singapore already broadcasting digital radio simultaneously with its analogue transmission, Marshall expected demand for the digital medium to ramp up further.

DIS Technology managing director Dustin Cheah said: "The radios are manufactured in Penang. We design them and outsource the parts from various suppliers as we don’t want to focus on one supplier,” said Cheah.

“We can currently produce a few thousand units per month. As and when the volume picks up, we can always outsource (to) other manufacturers to manufacture the sets for us,” he added.

Apart from the introduction of the DAB radio by its technical partner M&G, DIS Technology also launched its Dolarmaker.com, an e-commerce portal for the company to retail its line of Blue Thunder ICT products.