ASIAN TECHNOLOGY Compaq Slashes Prices in Asia In an Effort to Take On Toshiba
May 16, 2011
WHERE I COME from, if someone offers you a sweetheart deal on a piece of property, the first thing you do is figure out why the seller wants to unload it. It may be the land is swamp-front real estate with easy access to a sinkhole, or it could be the owner made a bad bet at the racetrack and needs the cash to keep his kneecaps from getting broken. The same can be said of computers. Compaq Computer, for example, is in the process of slashing prices across Asia for its high-end LTE 5000 series of notebook computers, according to Paulene Thrift, the company's director of PC products for Asia. In Hong Kong, the price of the LTE 5280 M810 was cut 15% to 31,200 Hong Kong dollars (US$4,035). The top-notch LTE 5300 tumbled from HK$43,276 to HK$39,275. And if that isn't low enough, just wait. ``We're actually not just going to do this now but probably again in the next few months,'' says Pierre Larue, Compaq's general manager for Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. Similar reductions are in store around the region, according to Mr. Thrift. Where there aren't outright price cuts, he says, dealers will be throwing in extras such as added memory and a carrying case. If you've been saving up to buy what Mr. Thrift calls Compaq's flagship multimedia notebook, this may be an excellent chance to get a machine that, in the case of the 5300, has earned kudos from U.S.-based PC Magazine as a ``good bet for corporate buyers.'' Compaq's aim is clear. ``The cuts in the LTE are designed to give us more market share,'' says Mr. Thrift. More precisely, Compaq wants to wrest back market share it lost last year to Toshiba, which displaced Compaq as Asia's top notebook seller. Compaq's LTE already has a pricing edge. The Toshiba Tecra 720CDT sells in Singapore for roughly 9,500 Singapore dollars (US$6,750). The Compaq LTE 5300 now goes for about S$8,500. For the money, you get a 12.1-inch screen, a 133-megahertz  microprocessor, 16 megabytes of random-access memory and 1.35 gigabytes of hard-disk space. Toshiba gives you only 1.2 GB, but it can show movies on its Disc player and has a higher-resolution screen. Compaq offers a three-year warranty; Toshiba offers just one year. Dealers say the warranty may come in handier with the Compaq. Ray Wynne, a shop manager in Hong Kong Star Computer City, says Toshibas are generally more reliable, and Singapore dealer S.L. Chanda needs only turn the computers upside-down to demonstrate why: The LTE sold in Singapore is made in Taiwan, the Tecra in Japan. She recommends looking for LTEs made in the U.S. What usually goes wrong with the Taiwan-made LTE? The hard drive, the motherboard, even the battery, Ms. Chanda says, have given customers enough headaches that she is giving more shelf space to Toshiba nowadays. In fact, it is hard to find the LTE in Singapore among all the Toshibas. Some dealers even told me the LTE was being discontinued. Mr. Larue says this isn't true, but as far as dealers in Singapore are concerned it might as well be because Compaq's newest line of notebooks, dubbed Armada, offers nearly as much performance as the LTE for less money. Trouble is, while the Armadas were launched in late June, shipments from the factory where they are made in Singapore were delayed. ``The issue was really that we wanted to be 100% sure that the product was the quality that we expect,'' says Mr. Thrift. As a result, says Mr. Larue, Compaq isn't able to meet the Armada demand in Hong Kong. ``I'm not getting enough this month and I expect next month to be tight.'' But a sales target is a sales target, so down come the LTE prices. Internet Roaming Services Find Connections Are Slow THREE MONTHS after announcing programs that would enable customers to access their Internet accounts without having to pay for international phone calls, Hong Kong's Asia On-Line and Singapore Telecommunications' SingNet Telecommunications are still at the starting gate. In May, Asia On-Line, a subsidiary of Asia Communications Global, unveiled its International Internet Roaming Service, which aimed to build links to as many as 300 Internet service providers, or ISPs, throughout Asia and the world. Today, the service is still being tested between Asia On-Line and three ISPs in Australia, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Joel Prince, Assunta On-Whorton's managing director. The same month, SingNet and fellow Singapore ISP Cyberway signed a memorandum of understanding with U.S.-based Aimnet forming a Global Reach Internet Consortium that would form a roaming network among the three companies and Malaysia's Asia Connect, Thailand's Asia On-Line, Connect.com.au in Australia, Dream Train Internet in Japan, China's JitongNet and SeedNet in Taiwan. Cyberway says it has instituted a roaming service for users between it and Aimnet and Dream Train Internet. But Priddy says it is still testing its roaming service. Meanwhile, rival Singapore ISP Pacific Internet announced its roaming service only a few weeks ago but has already pulled ahead of its rivals. It says Japan-based consortium Asia Internet Holdings now has a roaming service in place among its members: Internet Initiative Japan, Hong Kong SuperNet, Pacific Internet and I\*Net in South Korea. Pacific Internet says its customers traveling in the U.S. can dial a number in California rather than back to Singapore to access their accounts.
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