By Dita De Boni
A single chip housing one million transistors is spearheading a bid to win a sizable slice of the hotly contested $20 million New Zealand hearing-aid market.
Bavarian electrical engineering multinational Siemens formally launched its own New Zealand-based specialised service in high-tech aids yesterday, designed to woo a bigger
portion of the estimated 400,000 hearing impaired New Zealanders.
Siemens Hearing Instruments currently supplies less than 10 per cent of the market in New Zealand but will introduce an assembly line for production within the next year with hopes to more than double market share.
Country manager Catherine Campbell says the company has the potential to boost sales to more than $5 million annually with the new line of second generation digital aids which fit discreetly in the ear canal and have the ability to fine-tune a host of different sounds.
She says the company's digital products are unique in New Zealand for their ability to "contrast" sounds, clarifying and separating sounds to replicate normal hearing rather than simply increasing the loudness of blurry or imperfect hearing.
The price of hearing aids is partially offset by subsidies from either the Accident Compensation Corporation or the War Pensions office, she says.
But the company believes despite financial assistance there is a still a huge untapped market of hearing impaired people reluctant to use hearing aids because of the stigma attached to the devices.
"Small high-tech devices are very popular because they can't be seen, and considering only one quarter of the people who need to wear a device actually do, we are very confident the new aids will move quickly," she says.
Custom-moulded hearing aid shells are manufactured by competitors in New Zealand at present, but a spokesperson from Audiology 2000 confirmed digital signal processing would be the first of its kind in this country.
Parent company Siemens has grown its share of the worldwide market in hearing devices to 20 per cent since Wemer von Siemens created the first telephone earpiece for his hard-of-hearing employees in 1878.
