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Laptops at China Prices
Computers | May 26, 05
Back on December 08, 2004, I reported on the Chinese firm Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, and speculated on whether lower production costs might result in the so-called "China price" effect, impacting the margins of rival producers like Dell (see "Can Dell Compete with the China Price"). The jury is still out on that, but in the months since that deal's announcement there has been a marked drop in Levono's IBM laptop prices.
For just one example, consider the IBM ThinkPad T42, a 4.9 pound,1.60 GHz Pentium M machine with 256MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a CDRW/DVD drive, modem, 100 BT and 802.11g wireless connectivity, 14.1 active matrix display and Windows XP Professional. As you can see from the graph below, at the end of last year this computer was going for north of $1,500, while right now it may be had for under $1,225, a drop of about 20% in just five months. There are quite a few other IBM models that have seen similar price drops – you can check these out here.
Time Period: 12/20/2004 through 5/23/2005
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price
Posted by jeffrey.trester (Permalink)
