ViewSonic jumped from 14th to 3rd in projectors and has held the No.1 spot in interactive flat panels in India since 2020.
Bengaluru R&D built myViewBoard with AI-driven lesson planning, Hindi-English tools, and safe curated content for classrooms.
Investing in “Make in India,” sleek projector designs, and ecosystem-driven solutions to cater to schools, corporates, and homes.
In India’s AV market, few categories have swung as sharply in fortunes as projectors and panels. What was once a classroom tool or boardroom accessory is now finding new life in homes and hybrid workplaces. For ViewSonic, a company better known for its monitors globally, this transition has been a chance to reframe its role in India. As Muneer Ahmed, Vice President of Sales and Marketing – AV Business, explained, the growth has come less from headline-grabbing products than from timing, adaptation, and a steady focus on education and corporate demand.
Survey“Eight to ten years ago, we were in the 14th place in projectors,” he recalled. “Today, we’re number three.” He paused, then added almost matter-of-factly, “And in interactive flat panels, we’ve been number one in India since 2020. Five years running.”
A Display Company That Never Sat Still
ViewSonic’s history itself is a story of reinvention. Founded in California in 1987, it began life in the monitor business, first with CRTs, then LCDs, and later LEDs. “It’s always been an innovative company,” Ahmed said, listing off firsts like dock-station projectors in the early 2000s and even tablets launched before Apple’s iPad redefined the category. “We’ve never been just a hardware seller,” he insisted. “We’ve tried to build ecosystems, pairing hardware with software.”
That transition proved critical. By 2016–17, when competitors were still obsessed with moving boxes, ViewSonic began bundling its panels with software. The gamble paid off. When COVID-19 struck, and classrooms and offices migrated online, the demand wasn’t just for flat panels but for tools that made them useful: AI-assisted lesson planners, interactive whiteboards, secure content platforms. “If you had asked people in 2019 whether they’d be comfortable with online classes, most would’ve said no,” Ahmed pointed out. “But the pandemic accelerated digitisation. Every home became a classroom, every phone a lecture hall.”
By the time India’s education system scrambled to modernise, ViewSonic already had the right tools.
Education as a Growth Engine
The numbers bear out the strategy. Globally, the interactive flat panel market is crowded, with competitors ranging from Korean chaebols to Chinese upstarts. But in India, ViewSonic carved out a niche by catering to the realities of the classroom. Its R&D team in Bengaluru developed features that looked mundane on paper but solved real problems on the ground.
Take myViewBoard, the company’s software suite. A teacher can type or speak a topic into the system, and in seconds, it generates lesson materials, PPTs, PDFs, or curated YouTube videos scrubbed free of embarrassing ads or unrelated thumbnails. “If you’re presenting to a class, you don’t want random videos popping up,” Ahmed said with a smile. “We built a filter that only pulls relevant content. That came from Indian feedback.” There were other, subtler innovations: text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools supporting Hindi and English interchangeably; grammar-highlighting features that could automatically identify verbs and nouns in a paragraph; integration with Google Drive so teachers could share lessons across schools and even countries.
To a Silicon Valley engineer, these might seem trivial. To a teacher in a Delhi public school juggling 60 students in a hybrid class, they are transformative. “AI in education is not about overwhelming students with the most advanced models,” Ahmed explained. “It’s about relevance. Simplicity.”
The Projector Paradox
Yet, if panels have driven growth, projectors remain the emotional heart of the AV business. For decades, they were the overlooked cousin of the TV, used in classrooms, boardrooms, or the occasional luxury home theatre. The Indian market, once 300,000 units annually, shrank to under 100,000 in recent years, a victim of affordable flat-screens and changing habits.
But here too, Ahmed sees opportunity in niches. Urban buyers, squeezed into smaller apartments but craving cinematic experiences, are rediscovering projectors. “If you want a 120-inch TV, it’s bulky, expensive, and often looks out of place in a flat,” he explained. “A projector gives you the same size at a fraction of the cost, and you can pack it away when you’re done.”
Technology has helped. Where once lamps lasted barely 600 hours and cost Rs 20,000 to replace, today’s LED and laser sources boast lifespans of 30,000–50,000 hours. Chips have shrunk, designs have become sleeker, and software integrations with Android TV and Google TV make projectors feel less like clunky peripherals and more like living-room natives. Viewsonic recently debuted the compact and portable M1 Max with a textured finish that blurs the line between tech and décor. “It’s not just about function anymore,” Ahmed said. “A projector can look good in your drawing room.”
Still, he’s pragmatic: the home-theatre market is growing, but mainstream adoption remains limited. “Panels are replacing projectors in schools. But for urban homes, projectors are starting to compete with TVs. That’s the inflection point.”
Made in India, Made for India
No conversation with a technology executive in India today is complete without invoking “Make in India.” For ViewSonic, it’s not just a slogan but a strategic hedge. Importing projectors still attracts duties of around 10% plus cess and 28% GST, making local production a long-term imperative. Panels, meanwhile, face a tiered tariff system that rewards companies for moving from semi-knockdown kits to fully component-level assembly.
ViewSonic has already begun manufacturing panels and non-touch displays in India, with projectors next on the horizon. “India is one of our biggest markets after the US and Europe,” Ahmed said. “We’re serious about investing here. You’ll see more products made in India in the coming years.”
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Localisation isn’t just about cost savings but about resilience. With supply chains increasingly politicised, from US-China tensions to shifting trade rules, having a domestic base allows ViewSonic to serve India on India’s terms.
Design and the Human Eye
Ahmed is candid about another shift: the rise of design as a differentiator. Where once projectors were judged solely by brightness and throw distance, today’s buyers care about aesthetics. The move from bulky LCD engines to compact Texas Instruments DLP chips opened the door to industrial design that appeals to younger, design-conscious consumers.
“You can’t underestimate the role of form,” he said. “A decade ago, nobody cared how a projector looked. Today, it’s part of the living room. It has to blend in.”
This blending is not just cosmetic. In a way, it mirrors ViewSonic’s broader evolution: from a hardware box-pusher to a company that sees displays as part of people’s lives, whether in classrooms, conference rooms, or living rooms.
The Road Ahead
If there’s a thread running through ViewSonic’s Indian story, it’s timing. The company didn’t just ride trends; it anticipated them. It entered panels before the pandemic made them essential. It invested in software before education realised it needed more than glass screens. And it’s betting on projectors just as Indian consumers begin craving cinema-scale screens at home.
But the biggest challenge may be perception. “Many people still think we’re a Taiwanese company because India reports into our APAC headquarters in Taipei,” Ahmed admitted. “But ViewSonic is American, founded in California. Our APAC structure sometimes confuses the market.”
It’s a small detail, but it underscores the brand’s peculiar positioning: American by origin, Asian in supply chains, Indian in ambition.
When I asked Ahmed about his vision for the next few years, he didn’t offer a grand manifesto. Instead, he returned to the fundamentals: education, corporate collaboration, and the home. “We’re an ecosystem company now,” he said. “Hardware plus software. That’s what will scale.”
It’s a modest phrase for a company that has climbed from 14th to 3rd in less than a decade, but in an industry obsessed with spectacle, it’s the long game that makes all the difference.
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Siddharth Chauhan
Siddharth reports on gadgets, technology and you will occasionally find him testing the latest smartphones at Digit. However, his love affair with tech and futurism extends way beyond, at the intersection of technology and culture. View Full Profile
