TOA in the World

Part One: Giving voice to Islamic prayer in Indonesia

People kneeling in prayer on brightly colored carpets. Verses from the Koran reverberating through the solemnity of the space..

Indonesia is the country with the world's largest Islamic population. And in many of the mosques where the faithful worship, the voices of the clergy reading aloud from the Koran are carried by none other than amplifiers and loudspeakers manufactured by TOA's Indonesian production facilities. But it's not only mosques, for these and other TOA public address products also happen to hold an overwhelming top share in Indonesian markets for other applications, including a wide variety of commercial and public facilities.

1975 - TOA builds its first overseas factory in Indonesia
"TOA" name becomes synonymous with horn speakers

Indonesia, with some 228 million inhabitants, is the most populated country in the ASEAN region and the fourth largest in the world. In 1975 TOA went there to enlist the cooperation of a local Indonesian company in building its first overseas factory. Today there are two TOA factories in Indonesia, PT. TOA GALVA INDUSTRIES and PT. TOA GALINDRA ELECTRONICS. These employ about 800 people in the manufacture of products for both the local market and for export to Japan and other countries in Asia.

Model of the TGI factory facility and grounds

Indonesia is home to tens of thousands of mosques of all sizes and scales, from miniscule ones akin to Japan's tiny "village shrines" to grand halls that can hold well over a thousand praying worshippers. What many of these have in common though, are sound systems including horn speakers used to broadcast worship times and column speaker systems that carry the voices of the clergy to the gathered faithful. Such installations are one of TOA's best competencies in the Indonesian market.

TOA is particularly strong in the horn speaker market, where it enjoys an almost exclusive hold, to the extent that horn speakers are still often called "Toa" (an abbreviation the company's former name, "Toa Tokushu Denki or Toa Electric Co., Ltd."). Most of these are, of course, produced at TOA's localized Indonesian production facilities.

In other realms, Indonesia's rapid economic development has brought other opportunities, for example to install emergency broadcast systems and other products in luxury hotels, shopping malls, and office buildings, another market where TOA holds the number one share. The company is also expanding installations in universities and other educational facilities.

 

Toward a "local production for local consumption" system to supply markets in Asia

TOA's business in Asia is not limited to Indonesia, of course. The localized company TOA ELECTRONICS PTE LTD, located in Singapore (one of the most advanced countries in the ASEAN region), serves as a headquarters for TOA's Asia-Oceania operations. This office boasts a track record featuring numerous installations of high-end broadcast related equipment in venues like shopping malls and office buildings. In Malaysia the company has been making forays into applications like mosques and commercial facilities, and in Thailand holds a strong share in broadcast equipment for universities and Buddhist temples.

But of course, it's not really accurate to talk simplistically about "the Asian market," because there are significant differences in consumer preferences from country to country. In Vietnam, for example, more expensive products are generally accepted as long as they offer high quality and higher functionality, but in nearby Thailand and Malaysia consumers tend to demand less expensive products from the start.
To meet such specific local needs, it is impossible to plan and design products from faraway Japan. Instead, TOA has for some time now been localizing its product planning and design efforts for products headed to the diverse Asian markets. A development team comprised of local engineers in Indonesia is now at the forefront of that effort.

Local engineers are now being trained by engineers dispatched from Japan, with the aim of developing products tailored to ASEAN regions. Some of the products these have developed are already circulating in various Asian markets, notably BGM-use speakers for small and mid-sized businesses. The goal is to use the fruits of these development efforts to gradually replace products in local markets, which until now have generally been planned and designed in Japan. This will allow TOA back in Japan to concentrate its development efforts more on shared worldwide markets, for example high-end AV products.