Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Who is the largest supplier of pianos today?

In the past few years, most of the largest piano suppliers have either went down or down-sized to a definite low key operation. Who will be the front runner now? Steinway will continue to sell pianos but who is going to get the lion's share of pianos sold in the next 2-3 years? Samick is coming back stronger, Pearl River seems to be holding about the same percentage of pianos sold, but who will come out the largest? Your opinions?

Respectfully,

Yamaha.

Ahamay in the parallel universe Ademordna.

We homo sapiens type earthlings tend to be so anthroprocentric as to believe that only piano companies on our little terra firm could be the largest. Ours do have the tones going up from left to right which lefties in Ademordna appreciate, but of course they don't call lefties lefties there but righties righties.

I know here in the UK most new pianos sold are Yamaha as well as a large range of imported U1s U2s and U3s directly from Japan.

Even Schimmel is partly owned by Yamaha...

Isn't this topic something that is periodically published in piano trade journals?

What is a piano supplier? Do you mean piano manufacturer? And if so, how are you defining "manufacturer"? In other words, a single piano manufacturer might make pianos that are sold under several brand names. For example, Kawai makes Kawai and Boston pianos. Are you counting the Bostons as part of Kawai's production? There are many companies (Pearl River, Young Chang, Dongbei, to name a few) that sell pianos under many labels. Are you including all pianos made by a manufacturer, no matter under what name the pianos are sold, or are you going by brand name only? It seems to me that unless we define the terms, the information generated in this thread will be too ambiguous to be useful.

Shoenhut is poised to take the world by storm with its $299 baby grand. If it catches on fire, I could lead the world in a few years.

http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2323979

Brad

Rank,

I think the man said 'supplier', not seller. If a maker supplies private labels, stencils, and OEM, it should count toward the total.

The more interesting question regards sold / unsold. I think I know who the world's leading maker is in terms of annual output, but I don't really know how many of its pianos have been sold and how many are accumulating unsold.

Another question is largest in dollar value or in quantity sold.

The industry will consolidate into four giant companies -- YamaDorfer, SteinWai, Sam Chang, and Dong River -- and in reality, they'll all secretly be built in China by factories run by Chen Hailun.

You have taken a simple thread and made it difficult. My question was who is the largest SUPPLIER. Yes, Samick could be considered under the 14 thousand names that they will make a piano under. The very sad part of this is that in the 1970's and 1980's, this question would have been easy to answer. Today, it is not. The Chinese manufacturers have flooded the market with many piano names made in the same factory, by the same workers and nobody knows what the piano is going to be called until it gets to the stenciling stage. Whatever happened to the pride of manufacturing a quality piano? Being proud of putting your own name on it was once a very nice thing. Rank Amateur, you obviously are. But the balance of this equation is that we have left the time of credibility and entered the times of how many pianos we can push out into homes regardless of the sound, touch, feel or tonal quality. That is my point.

Respectfully,

Quote: "Whatever happened to the pride of manufacturing a quality piano?"

Indeed! Where did it go in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and up to very recently in the American heartland of piano making? Most of the Chinese products we see today are much better than some of what our domestic industy was stuffing down our throats for decades.

I am not a huge fan of the many names of pianos coming in from China, but I cannot agree with the point made in the box above.

When I as a technician am called out into the homes of people to work on post - WW II North American pianos: spinets and consoles that were produced by the hundreds of thousands and which were junk when they were new, and which continue to turn unsuspecting young students off of playing piano, not unlike abandoned drift-nets continue to catch and kill fish for years and years, I think that the "time of credibility" etc. etc. was left over 60 years ago.

Sorry for the run-on sentence - the mere thought of the crimes against pianists perpetrated by N.A. producers for decades can bring my blood to boil.

Jurgen, do I understand you correctly? Do you consider, say, Hailun grands and uprights more serviceable than post-WW II North-American pianos when they were new? This is an honest question.

doremi,

I consider a Hailun grand or upright more servicable than almost any Kimball piano built after the 1960's. Add to this many (but not all) of the Aeolian built pianos, particularly spinets and compressed console actions, lots of the verticals made by Baldwin at the time, and I understand exactlt what Jurgan is saying. Hailun pianos need suitable prep., but the piano is a decent design that uses nicely chosen materials that are assembled with reasonable consistency.

This was not happening in all of the factories that churned out spinets and low line pianos here at that time.

Back to the original question, Yamaha was #1 for a number of years in '80s and '90s, but they are not largest now. For the past decade, the largest has been disputed, because numbers have been so close. Pearl River had claimed the title for a few years, but I have no idea who holds the title now.

To be clear, I have never had interest in knowing who was currently the largest manufacturer. None of the manufacturers who have ever claimed that title have gotten there by building fine instruments, they have gotten there by building inexpensive pianos - period. Some have built some that actually worked and that is laudable, but they have all made compromises in manufacturing to make the pianos cheaper.

Anyone recall the Yamaha LU-11? Point made.

As one who sold most of the mentioned 60's and 70's American piano's (Kimball,retail.Aeolian Products Wholesale)I agree that most Chinese pianos coming to the U.S today are very much better.And when it comes to Grands it's completely "no contest".
With a few exceptions American Grands (Baldwin Steinway M&H)were vastly inferior to the Chinese grands of today.The early Pianos from Japan tho better and cheaper then the American Grands were not as good as most of today's Chinese.

It is far too easy to generalize here, but regarding the pianos I am talking about: absolutely no question - ask any technician. But it is not just the servicing aspect. I am talking about touch, tone and expecially musicality as well.

One thing the American PSOs had "going for them" was that they were built at a high enough quality standard to survive way too may decades of torturing their players' ears. In my opinion, the quality of the generic domestic pianos that flooded into North Amercan homes was a serious factor in the demise of piano playing.