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DVD Player Maker's Margins just $1
callipygian-showsyst writes "This news.com story tells how Chinese DVD player manufacturers are only making $1 margins per player! The story says that 'Commoditization is hitting China's DVD player manufacturers hard, according to researcher iSuppli, Between January and May, the average selling price of a DVD player exported out of the Guangdong province came to $40.80, leaving just about $1 in profit margins for the manufacturers.'
You wonder if other business, like low-end PCs hardware, are in similar trouble."
And all so that some trailer trash lady can get trampled for an Apex DVD player the day after Thanksgiving...
i knew i should have waited 10 years instead of getting that $300 dvd player!
...since they sell their hardware at a loss. (Granted, they get money from the service subscription.) Microsoft loses billions of dollars on the XBox, to sell games. This is common, and will be getting moreso. It won't be long before hardware is essentially free, and the software/services you buy are where the money is generated.
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That is the 'new' economy.. Forget the days of high profit items for most industries that
are technology related.
This is a byproduct of more efficient manufacturing, and in many cases, *fair* competition..
( something that we don't currently have in this country , but that is a different subject )
Don't expect this trend to change any anytime soon either...
Too bad it also means fewer jobs to make the money to buy the cheap items... Since it takes fewer people to make the same # of items it did 10 years ago.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You play to the strengths of the manufacturing of each country, take out the middleman, and we no longer have to pay inflated costs for everything.
Kind of wierd to think that it's cheaper to get something made and shipped halfway around the world than it is next door, but if it makes a dollar go farther in this economy I'm all for it.
Enjoy your stay.
If those players were made in the US or even Japan they would start at $100 a piece. If you're an unemployed electrical engineer in the US / Western Europe (and I know there's quite a few), relieve the boredom with a $35 multi-region DVD player.
Welcome to globalisation too - those Chinese manufacturers _are_ in it for the money
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Also, of course, it eventually allows the Chinese companies to gain a foothold in the US market, under their own names. That's how most Japanese and later the South Korean electronics firms slowly made a name for themselves and their countries in the US market.
First, they start by selling low-end stuff, usually under another manufacturer's brand, and often justifiably branded as crap. But they're cheap, and consumers don't care about quality, just price, so they buy them in droves.
Then, slowly move up the market towards the higher end once your distribution and manufacturing experience is honed, and you have more budget for R&D.
Now, China is posed to follow after Japan and South Korea's footsteps now. Already, you're strating to see Chinese brands marketed under their own names in the US, like Konka and Haier. It shows no signs of stopping.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Fair is defined as a level playing field. If we are playing a game of soccer, and your team cheats, the match was not fair. If no one cheats, it is a fair match. It is not required that our teams like each other: it's quite possible to play a fair match against someone you absolutely despise.
Fair competition is the same. If a government is heavily subsidizing a company, that's not fair competition. If a group of companies is colluding to drive a competitor out of business, that's not fair competition. If lots of people are making the same thing, thereby driving down prices, that's fair competition.
What you seem to be looking for is no competition, wherein either a government or cartel sets prices, rather than the market. That has nothing to do with fair competition, and is really about the exact opposite.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
At least close to perfect competition since in perfect competition, the profitsare zero. I don't really see how this is a problem.
Once you figure in shipping costs, customs & foreign legal costs, time delay, and sometimes translation problems sometimes changing how you operate in the USA can actually be cheaper.
I remember reading how MPC computers (formerly Micron) was considering outsourcing like dell and gateway have done. They took a different approach, and are doing much better. They have found that they can compete while staying in the USA and not outsourcing anything. Of course, the fact that they're not in a high-rent area of the USA probably helps. The cost of living in areas like California and NYC really skews the numbers.
I don't read AC A human right
``You wonder if other business, like low-end PCs hardware, are in similar trouble.''
Yes, they are. This is why they try to squeeze every cent out of everything, leaving us with motherboards with leaking capacitors, harddrives with 1 year MTBF, memory errors, etc. Those of us who run cheap PC hardware, anyway.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Those DVD players cost $40 only because the Chinese government keeps the Yuan artifically pegged at roughly 8 yuan to 1 US Dollar. Floating the currency will bring the ratio up to 4:1, maybe even 2:1.
Already, you're strating to see Chinese brands marketed under their own names in the US, like Konka and Haier.
You mean I won't be able to buy a TV from Magnetbox, Panaphonic, or Sorny anymore?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
EETimes covered this last month. http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=256 00132
This is the way it works. Every new handset generation comes with a compelling new set of features. Each is subsidized by service providers to get it on the market. But each feature set quickly triggers a market share war among service providers, causing them to offer the handset for bubble-pack pricing or to simply bundle it with a service contract and give it away. The only money for the service provider is in services -- not in hardware. This exerts incredible pricing pressure on handset makers, both to innovate and to ruthlessly eliminate their own margins.
This is just the way things go in electronics manufacturing, and it makes sense. Electronics technology moves much faster than manufacturing technology, so there is just inherent pressure in the market that eventually drives out profits. The nice thing about this is that it forces innovative new ideas to come along to a) Make improvements in manufacturing efficiency, b) Stay on the bleeding edge of technology with new products that can generate high margins for a good while (see Dell's foray into high-end "gaming" systems) and c) Build highly innovative products with killer features and high consumer appeal (see the iPod).
As for the commodity manufacturers, the market corrects itself. There is a glut in worldwide DVD-player manufacturing capacity. Some of these companies will continue to eek out meager profits building DVD-players, while others will retool and remain successful manufacturing the next generation of commodity electronics, and still others will die. But this is merely a sympton of progress. Those companies that survive will be the reason we can get LCD TV's for $200 by Christmas 2006, and the whole cycle will repeat itself.
HO
The labor is much cheaper but a lot of other expenses make up much of the difference. Despite Mexican wages being 10% that of US workers, a $500 US refrigerator still costs about $470 when made in Mexico.
According to this post the patent fees for a DVD player work out to be about $20. The author is effectively anonymous, so hard to verify, but the DVD 6c fees are listed here and they are only part of the picture, so $20 may be the real deal.
Given that half the cost of the system goes to the patent holders (remind anyone of Microsoft?), it is no wonder that China has licensed On2 Technology's VP6 codec for a reported flat $2 a player for there own hi-def video disc standard.
That should get them out from under the thumb of the big-corp licensing fees at home and lead to a flood of DVD players in the USA that also support VP6. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if within a year or so we start seeing asian bootleggers who currently do VCDs and SVCDs switch over to bootleg VP6 discs that are higher quality than even any DVD.
Wouldn't that be some global karma for the pigopolists in hollywood? I, for one, am actually rooting for China on this.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Martin: "How much is your penny candy?" :)
Apu: "Surprisingly expensive."
Increasingly over the next ten yearts currency won't be as important in international trade as commdoities, especially energy. Soon china will have a large enough domestic market that it won't need US dollars or us as a market, they will only need massive amounts of raw materials and energy sources, which we can't supply much of. Our dollar has been dropping steadily the past several years. that makes our exports cheaper, but we are exporting less, and what we have been exporting is more in the line of factories/machine tools, etc, things to make manufacturing easier to china. They are also heavy into double digits into force-projection styled military buildup, and a buck there goes a lot further than here. A million bucks in china actually gets stuff done, here it forms a few committess to decide if more committes are necessary to study the project at hand. They are also pumping out engineers like we pump out wannabe pro sports starts and musicians.
It's gonna get ugly sometime, and we stand a good chance of losing.
The owners of the DVD patents have been battling the Chinese makers to extract very high royalties. They have succeeded in harming this industrial sector. Here's one story. This is a great example of how all the value is moving to IP, and what the stakes are in today's IP wars.
Just think - of the $50 purchase price, $27 goes to patent owners and only $1 in profit goes to the factory owners!
Really, profit isn't the point.
The first objective is to create jobs. Especially in a socialist/communist country, it doesn't really matter whether the company makes big profits, it matters that they provide good jobs to the people. So, if the company pays the workers $2 per DVD player more than a US-owned company in China would, and makes a $1 profit per DVD player, then a US-owned company in China making the same DVD player would make three times the profit.
The second point is to build up specialization. Making DVD players takes much more skill and training than making bamboo furniture for export. This encourages Chinese kids to stay in school longer because better jobs are available, which increases the net national education, which leads to more innovation and development.
The third, and most important point, is to take over the world. Take a look at the Chinese currency. China's been making more and more stuff for export, and the US has been importing more and more from China. So, you would expect the Chinese RenMinBi to have increased in value compared to the US dollar over the last decade -- but it didn't, really.
The reason that the RenMinBi has not dramatically increased in value compared to the US dollar is that China has been systematically buying (investing in) US companies with their new US dollars just as fast as those US dollars are coming in from the US. This is called a "balance of trade deficit" for the US. It's not sustainable for China to keep doing this, but very soon the communists will OWN capitalism.
Forget this cold war shit, the best way to beat the capitalist pigs is to play by their rules (internationally), buy them out, and it's working.