On Tuesday 17 February 2004 11:50 pm, Michael Chaney wrote: > Not to taunt you with our lower prices in the US, but I bought an Asus > A7V over a year ago for about $150. It includes firewire, Gig-E, USB 1 > & 2 (the fast "2"), 6-channel audio, SATA, Promise IDE RAID controller > for the first IDE controller, etc. I believe at the time I paid around > $150 for the CPU, too (1.45GHz Athlon). Anyway, the A7V series is a sweet > desktop board. > > Anyone know why the prices are so high in the Philippines?
I don't know, but I can make guesses (some people on the list might be computer store owners, they'll have better insights, although most of the big computer store owners, the ones who really know the mechanics and the financials are going to be microsoft centric and probably not on this list :). generic hardware is generally at about the same price as in the U.S. (maybe a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower). I'm not sure what tariffs might still be imposed on computer hardware. it used to be high, but with GATT it should be lower or nonexistent by now. it's probably still higher than U.S. tariffs though (although smuggling should take the price down a bit). the main reason, i think, is that the market is small (much smaller than the U.S. market). even for generic hardware, there just isn't that much room for profiting on volume. for specialty hardware (SATA, SCSI, dual or quad processor boards etc), the market is even smaller. since the market is so small, and since you generally can't get items on consignment (at any rate, you can't stock your warehouse on consignment, you might be able to order a few hundred dollars, maybe even a couple of thousand dollars worth of items on short term credit from your upstream supplier) inventory costs are high. you have to *buy* the hardware before you can sell it. if you want specialty hardware, you either buy it and keep it in stock (risking loss when the price drops eventually, or it's superseded by new versions) or you keep only a few generic items in stock, and you order the specialty items as they're ordered by your customers. it doesn't help that credit (from banks) isn't cheap. at interest rates of 25% to 30% a year (well, last time i looked, i haven't looked in a year or so, but with the economy continuing to go south, it's probably still in that range), it doesn't make sense to pay for inventory on credit unless profits on items are very high. tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo gquimpo*hotmail.com tiger*sni*ph http://bopolissimus.sni.ph Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" ... and then you see the world for what it really is: an endless parade of babbling nincompoops. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
