For many companies looking to find a way to breakthrough competitive markets, HearAtLast, a wholly-owned subsidiary of HearAtLast Holdings, Inc., has partnered up with Wal-Mart of Canada. This gives HearAtLast a great advantage over competitors, primarily in the areas of pricing and marketing, and the company looks to grow rapidly in the near and distant future. HearAtLast offers customers affordable, high-quality hearing aids to the hearing impaired of Canada.
Currently, the company has five distribution outlets placed within Wal-Mart stores in Canada, and in the months of August and September, the company is planning on opening five more. Within the next three-to-four years, officials at Wal-Mart expect to have 200 or more HearAtLast stores in Canada.
It is estimated that 3.1 million people are hard of hearing in Canada, and 31.5 million people are hard of hearing in the United States. Both the U.S. and Canada’s “hard of hearing” populations are expected to increase more than 10% over the next ten years. Even more staggering, is that less than 25% of individuals, who should use hearing aids, actually do. This is attributed to the high costs and inconvenience of purchasing satisfactory devices, and to the embarrassment that may come with highly-visible aids. HearAtLast is optimistic in improving that percentage by lowering costs, advances in sound technology, and shrinking size.
The company maintains a very low in-store and corporate cost structure and could achieve significant profitability by mid 2009, possibly reaching an annual forecast per-share EPS of US$0.24 by calendar Q1’11E.
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