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Dr. Edmund Sun is no stranger to adversity. He was honored at the DVD Summit this year as one of the founders of the industry. The Lifetime Achievement award was richly deserved because Sun was the founder of C-Cube, the company that made the first MPEG decoder chip.
That battle was long and hard - Sun is a gifted scientist, not a marketing man. Profits only started to flow when his protege Alex Balkanski took the helm.
Sun then formed Digital Video Systems, a publicly held company based in California which until recently had branch offices in Atlanta, Taipei, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Panyu, China. Established in 1992 this originally specialized in Video CD and CD-i systems.
Losses have been horrendous since the bottom fell out of the Asian VCD market. In February the company reported a quarterly loss of $3.7m, an improvement on the previous year's quarterly loss of $4.8m But with quarterly revenues of only $5m...