Yesterday something very interesting happened: Woot put on sale 193 refurbished Samsung Q1 for around $750, a Samsung Q1, refurbished and with only 3 month of warranty. And guess what happened.
They sold one unit every 4 minutes. They sold the 193 units in less than 17 hours. Woot made around 49 dollars in each unit sold for a total of 9410 dollars in 17 hours. 10% of buyers bought 3 units and 5% bought 2 units!
And all this for a refurbished Q1 with only 3 month warranty. Could you imagine what would have happened if they sell 193 brand new Q1 for the same price of 750 dollars? How long do you think that would have lasted? Samsung, TabletKiosk, PlaceBlade, Asus, learn from these numbers, the market is there just waiting for the right price to come.
[Posted at Ultranauts.com]
As long as they're selling briskly, they don't need to learn to price the products better. Everything I've read seems to indicate that supply of the devices is very limited. This may be because manufacturers haven't made enough, but it also may be because plenty of people are willing to pay the current prices.
ReplyDeleteCtitanic, i agree your analyze but the big success wlll come with light hardware. the origami concept dont need xp and hard drive.
ReplyDeleteCtitanic, Your missing the bigger picture - at $49 a unit profit - that is less then 6.5% profit - a "very lean running company" like Dell has corporate overhead in the 3-4% range - I want to make sure tht the company I buy product from will be here for more then three months to support the product and continue to develop for it. If you are only making 2.5% profit at the end of the day, as a shareholder of the company I am going to tell you to make another widget with a higher margin...
ReplyDeleteSo, do you think that Samsung made 3%?
ReplyDeleteThat's what woot made that date! I'm sure that Samsung made a lot more even selling those units to Woot at 700 dollars. If seems to me my friend anonymous that you are the one missing the point. unless you are just a reseller rebranding one of these devices.;)
Ctitanic, I'm an executive at a fortune 500 company and a happy owner of the Samsung Q1. I have nothing to do with the UMPC market, besides being a user of the technology. I bought my Q1 from CDW and was happy to get as much computing power as I did for the $1300+ I paid (shipping and taxes) - I also know that CDW will be there tommorow to service the unit if needed... I just wanted to state my opinion about your unrealistic expectations about pricing - and that there is more to pricing then the raw cost of the componnets.
ReplyDeleteanonymous, I understand your point but being around these mobile technologies for a long time tell me one thing: If they (Ms and mfrs) want this new concept to be successful the prices needs to go down to 700 dollars because the average Joe wont pay for a companion PC the same price he paid for his main PC.
ReplyDelete