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Strategies & Market Trends : Technical analysis for shorts & longs
SPY 676.47+0.8%Dec 18 4:00 PM EST

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To: Johnny Canuck who wrote (16516)6/12/1998 4:08:00 PM
From: broken_cookie  Read Replies (3) of 69121
 
How Low Can PCs Go? Not Much Lower

from Herb Greenberg at the street.com

Is that the sound of crunching PC margins in the
background? Quite possibly. It's all hush-hush, but I hear
from normally reliable sources that four Taiwanese PC
makers are planning to announce as early as next week at
PC Expo in New York a new line of desktop PCs priced at
$299, $399 and $499. Currently, the cheapest models cost
around $700. If all goes well, the ultracheap PCs should be
rolled out at retail in time for back-to-school. Each machine
supposedly will use a 233-megahertz Cyrix chip, with the
cheapest model sporting a black-and-white monitor.

Execs of Acer have been talking for months of their desire to
roll out a $300 PC. But such low prices hadn't been
expected for at least another year. "Nobody is quite ready
for those kinds of price points," says hardware analyst
Stephen Baker at PC Data, which has been predicting that
two-thirds of all PCs sold in the fourth quarter will be priced
below $1,000 -- double the number sold in that price range a
year earlier.

Today, however, the typical storefront PC shop can build and
sell a decent machine for as little as $500 -- not benefiting
from the lower prices associated with mass production.

Which companies will be behind the cuts? The only clue: A
story in Wednesday's AsiaBizTech news service reported
that Acer, Leo Computer Systems, Synnex Technology
and Mitac International were slashing the prices of
computers equipped with Intel's (INTC:Nasdaq) Pentium II
to around $800.

Some analysts say that such rapidly falling prices may
spark demand -- at least initially -- but not enough to offset
the cuts. Not good news for an industry still trying to unclog
a stuffed pipeline of higher-priced merchandise.
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