(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| IBM Japan's Aptiva E Series PC Prices Fall: Nikkei PC Survey
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July 22, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Retail prices of IBM Japan Ltd.'s low-end desktop
PCs are declining, according to a survey conducted by Nikkei Personal
Computing.
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The survey was conducted on July 12, and focused on PC prices offered
by volume retailers in Akihabara and Shinjuku, Tokyo.
The price of the high-performance Aptiva E2A with an AMD K6 233MHz microprocessor
and a 17-in. display declined by 30,000 yen (US$216) to 178,000 yen
(US$1,280) from a week earlier.
Prices of Sony Corp.'s space-saving desktop PCV-M330 series also declined.
The price of the PCV-M330V5 with a 233MHz Pentium MMX microprocessor
and 15-in. display dropped by 20,000 yen (US$140) to 179,800 yen (US$1,295)
from a week before.
Toshiba Corp.'s thin notebook PC called DynaBookSS PORTEGE 3010 was introduced
at a price of 318,000 yen (US$2,290). It is a direct rival to Sony's
VAIO 505 series.
Despite the traditional summer shopping season, sales were not as brisk
as retailers had expected. They said sales were satisfactory until the
middle of June. But because the launch of Microsoft's Windows 98 was
approaching, customers started to take a wait-and-see attitude.
On July 13, the day following the survey, many popular PC models were
out of stock at shops in the Akihabara area. This was due to production
adjustments by manufacturers, a shop manager said.
After the launch of Windows 98, it is expected that the prices of models
with Windows 95 will decline sharply.
The survey is conducted by Nikkei Personal Computing on retail prices
at six major PC volume retailers in Akihabara and Shinjuku, Tokyo, on
a weekly basis.
The retail prices were calculated from the average prices of four stores
of the six, excluding those with the highest and lowest prices.
Details of the survey are available at Nikkei
Personal Computing's Web page in Japanese only.
Related story: Sales
Prices of PC Summer Models Stable: Nikkei PC Survey
(Nikkei Personal Computing)
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