iRiver, stylized IRIVER and formerly as iriver, is a South Korean consumer electronics division owned by Dreamus which markets music and other accessories in its domestic market. The company, then officially known as ReignCom, was created in 1999 by seven former Samsung executives, initially releasing portable CD players and later widely known in the 2000s for a line of digital audio players and other portable media devices. In 2019 the company was rebranded as Dreamus. History In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae-Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, while keeping R&D in-house. The company's first iRiver product was the iMP-100, a portable CD player capable of decoding MP3 data files on CDs, released in November 2000. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SONICblue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. iRiver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world. By now, iRiver portable CD players had achieved high domestic popularity and were also popular elsewhere. iRiver was one of a number of South Korean companies who were dominating the worldwide MP3 industry in these early years. 2002–2005 In 2002, iRiver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. Best Buy chain. This led to the release of their first DAP product, the iFP-100 "Prism" - named as such because of its distinctive shape designed by its design firm partner, INNO Design. By the end of the year, iRiver had already gained as much as 20% of the domestic market and was steadily increasing popularity in foreign markets. A year later, it was first to market with 512 MB and 1 GB flash players with its iFP-500 "Masterpiece" player. It had also completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. The company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod: the iHP-300 followed by the H300. iRiver rose to the No. 1 position in the global market of flash players. Its global market share overall was 14.1% in 2003, while Apple led