Apex Digital Inc president arrested

[lordsmurf]

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/10530722.htm

Apex Digital chairman arrested in China

BEIJING (AP) - Chinese police have arrested the chairman of California-based electronics maker Apex Digital Inc., the U.S. Embassy confirmed Thursday, following reports that he was being investigated for financial fraud.

David Ji, who founded Apex in 1999, was detained in October in the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese newspapers had reported earlier.

His detention followed an investigation by police in the western province of Sichuan -- the home base of Chinese television maker Sichuan Changhong Electric Co., which says Apex owes it $467.5 million, the reports said.

``The U.S. Consulate-General in Chengdu, China, has confirmed the arrest of David Longfen Ji,'' a U.S. Embassy official said Thursday on customary condition of anonymity.

``Consular officials in Chengdu requested and were allowed consular access to this U.S. citizen,'' the official said. ``We do not have permission ... to release further information.''

Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province.

Apex, based in Ontario, Calif., did not immediately return calls Wednesday night.

The privately-held company is a leading importer of Chinese-made televisions and DVD players to the United States. Ji, who was born in China, founded the firm with a Taiwanese partner.

Changhong Electric said earlier this week it would post large losses in 2004 due in part to debt owed it by Apex, its main U.S. distributor.

Changhong is ``trying through legal channels to reduce the economic losses,'' company spokesman Liu Haizhong said Thursday. He said he didn't know Ji's legal status.

Police in Sichuan's economic crimes investigation unit refused to comment on the case.

I've long heard that they owed loads of money, and that the company was probably going to be in trouble eventually, but I never guessed execs would be arrested!

The slow disappearance of Apex products from stores was foreseen, and the fact that retailers like Walmart quit selling their faulty recorders (though excellent quality!) probably didn't help any.



......

For those that care:

The Apex DRX-9200 uses the LSI DMN-8602 chipset, and does not have the exploding PSU problem of the DRX-9000 series. It may have CVBR instead of VBR, however, essentially making it the same as a LiteOn unit in quality (unconfirmed).

The faulty DRX-9000 units can be repaired. I posted about this in the DVD RECORDERS forum here at Videohelp in past months. Just search for it if you need that info. The units are great, and supposedly the fix is permanent. Cheap Chinese parts caused it, Japanese replacements fixes it.

[handyguy]

PBS did a show about Walmart recently & they did an excellent job of it. I get from that show that Apex was caught violating the free trade agreement by importing under priced electronics, so they had to pay higher import duties, so no more cheap Apex stuff. I think that's what happened.

[ZAPPER]

Breaks my heart to see a crook go to prison. Maybe he will like making tennis shoes and an AK-47 toting prison guard standing behind him the whole time. Don't fret he will get off.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Yeah I saw a report on TV about the corporate office in Ontario,CA only had 10 employees...talk about a low overhead.

[ZAPPER]

Sorry, I may have jumped the gun a bit here. I don't really know any of the facts. I too seem to recall that there may have been some creative bookkeeping or something to that effect going on at one time(maybe it was posted here or on the boob tube) But getting nailed by the Chinese is going to make things difficult for him. I hear that their justice systom is well lets say not as just, as some

[spiderman2k1]

Kind of sucks I liked APEX DVD player they are the best at playing back VCD and SVCD and they can take any bitrate that they are encode in VCR or CBR does not matter.

[Capmaster]

Kind of sucks I liked APEX DVD player they are the best at playing back VCD and SVCD and they can take any bitrate that they are encode in VCR or CBR does not matter.

They made a clever DVD player. I have one of their 13" color TVs I use for my capturing monitor. It works fine I think I paid $69 or some ridiculously low price for a new TV 8)

The bad thing about Apex going down the tubes is that it removes some serious, low-priced competition for the bigger players in the game. Without Apex, the average prices for CD/DVD/TV gear will go up. :P

[lordsmurf]

Nah... we still have Cyberhome and quite a few other crap brands. Walk around Fry's, Target, Walmart, etc .... shelves full of them. Apex is no loss. Their customer service sucks (non-existant is more like it), and they used too much cheap stuff, recorder PSU's and player ROM's always died on people.

Great quality products ... while they lasted.
And the only people that "serviced" broken ones was people in forums, never Apex itself.

[handyguy]

I think they used cheap caps so their tvs made funny noises....

Also, they would put closed captioning in their dvd players, just subtitles.

[Roundabout]

I almost applied for a job with them recently, they were advertising on Monster for several technical positions. Their Ontario office is only a couple of miles from where I live, so I thought it might be a good place to work... glad I didn't now!

I wonder if the entire company might go under now?

[budz]

i have 2 APEX 1500 DVD players still going strong (crosses my fingers) .....the best damn cheapest hackable players in my opinion....in my experience with their technical support i had no problems in sending back a defective 1500....the turn around time was 2 weeks and they sent me back a new 1500 via fed express 2 day air.....i do agree that APEX products don't last too long but hey for the cheap price what can one expect....

[Marvingj]

I like Apex For the Money. Its sad how people get caught for being dishonest.

[Ironballs]

He can probably say goodbye to one or more kidneys if he gets sent down

[handyguy]

Photo:
http://www.time.com/time/2002/globalinfluentials/gbijihsu.html

[offline]

Apex made nothing - they rebadged.

[Tidy]

In the late 90's I was CTO and head of manufacturing and procurement for a large OEM mail order PC company. We used to deal with a LOT of Chinese parts manufacturers and dealers. I have to say they all had something shady they were doing at one time or another. At one point we were raided by a couple of governement agencies looking for counterfeit software and "remarked" Intel CPU's. They seized a few hundred thousand dollars worth of my inventory. As it turns out a group of Chinese distributors was under investigation for multiple instances of coutnerfeiting and I was their largest customer by far, so it does not surprise me to hear that there may have been some book fixing or enormous bad debt.

[AlecWest]

Nah... we still have Cyberhome and quite a few other crap brands. Walk around Fry's, Target, Walmart, etc .... shelves full of them. Apex is no loss.

Yup. My one and only DVD player is an Apex AD-1100W, which I got at a time when I wanted anything that would play a VCD. It did (and still does) quite well. But since Apex came on the scene, there are now tons of other cut-rate DVD player makers (or resellers). While at Walmart the other day scoping out their meager selection of HDTVs, I noticed a shelf full of DVD players including Apex, Cyberhome, Symphonic, etc., all in the $39-$49 price-range. "Cheap" has a future.

[Madz]

Sorry to hear that about Apex. The AD-600A & 660 DVD players are personal favorites of mine. Have one of the former & two of the latter. Simple replacement of their crappy Korean-made loaders w/ IDE readers gave me burned DVD media playback capability. Recently tested them w/ +DL copies (made w/ a hacked-to-bookset Sony 700A & RecordNowDX Pro [for layer-break preservation]). Played through w/ no troubles. Adding the OFFA (hacked Sampo 631) FW adds such things as a 21-character MP3 display, JPG slideshow capabilities, MP3's-on-a-DVD-R(W) playback and more. Anyway, will always love those two players for the reasons stated above & because they'll play nearly anything.