Low cost tablet war to break out

When BiPad 9, a low cost tablet, hit the market with the attractive sale price of 1.98 million dong, Pi Vietnam also kicked off a price reduction program, so as to “bring the products closer” to popular clients. Businessmen believe that this would trigger a new war among low cost tablet manufacturers.

The “war” benefits consumers By launching the program on selling 10,000 BiPad 9s at 1.98 million dong (the normal price is 2.9 million dong), the new product distributed by Tri Nam Company could do one thing that could not be done by many other brands – catching the special attention from consumers and warming up the high technology product market, which was then cold. Nguyen Anh Hoa, Technique Director of Tri Nam Company, said that the program on selling 10,000 BiPads at 1.98 million dong per product, had finished sooner than initially planned thanks to a high number of buyers. “We are completing the first delivery stage of the program with 2500 tablets to be delivered,” Hoa said. While BiPad 9 hit the market in a noisy sale promotion program, Pi Vietnam, a company which appeared in Vietnam earlier than BiPad, also launched a price discount program. Under the program, Pi C003s, equipped with 7 inch touch screen capacitive multitouch, 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, Samsung Chip 1GHz, ARM Cortex A8, thin, 351 gram in weight, are sold at 3.2 million dong and 3.5 million dong for 4GB and 8GB versions, respectively, instead of 6 million and 6.6 million dong. Director of Pi Vietnam Pham Hong Tuyen said on Buu dien newspaper that in the time to come, her company would pay the special attention to the low cost tablet market segment, which target popular customers. Hi-tech experts have commented that the “declaration of the war” made by BiPad when launching BiPad 9 would replied by other manufacturers. It is understandable why Pi Vietnam and other companies have to quickly run sale promotion programs. The experts have predicted that the market would be even more bustling from March 2012, when more and more companies plan to reduce prices to make the products more affordable to consumers. FPT Tablet II would be unsalable? Hoa has revealed that the good sale of BiPad 9 has prompted the company to launch more new products in the time to come. BiPad 3G, for example, is scheduled to hit the market in April 2012, which would be priced at over 4 million dong. Low cost tablet products available on the market now can be classified into two groups. Some Vietnamese enterprises are distributing Chinese brand tablets at 3 million dong or less (Teclast, Onda, Window or Icoo, Ainol), but the business scale remains modest. Meanwhile, BiPad’s or Pi Vietnam’s products have been distributed through the large networks with good posts-sale services. Analysts have predicted that the competition in the market segment of the products valued at less than 4 million dong would be very stiff from April. Nguyen Ha, a client who is interested in low cost tablets, believes that in such circumstances, FPT Tablet II of FPT would be unsalable at the prices quoted at The gioi di dong distribution chain. On March 27, the quoted price of the product at the chain was 4.9 million dong. FPT Tablet II also has 7 inch screen, but the product’s processing speed is just 800 Mhz and RAM 512 MB, which means that its configuration is worse than Chinese products, or Vietnamese BiPad 9 and Pi Vietnam C003.

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