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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (25236)	3/9/2005 6:07:56 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

AWSJ Publishes Samsung Cell Phone Index Samsung’s “Anycall” cell phone joins the world's most famous products as a price index for the Asia-Pacific region. In the March 4~6 weekend edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal, Samsung’s model SGH-E800 cell phone became the first Korean product selected as the base of an index in the paper’s “Arbitrage Corner.” The Arbitrage Corner takes into consideration the prices of particular products converted into U.S. dollars. The “Anycall Index” reflected consumer prices in 11 nations in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, China, Australia and Singapore. The AWSJ had previously used Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches, Guinness beer and Heinz ketchup as indexes. The Economist’s “Big Mac Index” is the most famous index of this sort. The Anycall Index reveals that Sydney, Australia (US$683), Taipei, Taiwan (US$569) and Shanghai, China (US$563) were the most expensive places to buy the phone. Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur (US$398), Bangkok, Thailand (US$415), New Delhi, India (US$417) and Tokyo, Japan (US$428) were the cheapest. The Samsung SGH-E800 is a slide-model camera phone. Because it uses the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), it is not sold in Korea. (Kim Gi-yong darma90@chosun.com ) english.chosun.com

To: RealMuLan who wrote (25236)	3/9/2005 6:42:35 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Yiwu, price wars are rarely good for the sector as a glut of product is sold in short order pushing production capacity. However, the sector has too much capacity already and added Chinese capacity simply increases it even further which will result in a huge headache as sales likely will fall of a cliff after mid year.

To: RealMuLan who wrote (25236)	3/9/2005 9:22:37 PM
From: Earlie	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 116555

Yiwu: I'm always too "earlie". (g) Economically, card chip capability is not consequential compared with the "big two" (PCs and cell phones) markets. Also note that Chinese cell phone sales were way down year-over-year in the last 3 quarters. I don't know how they spell "saturation" over there but it sure creates the same kinds of problems. All the evidence I look at suggests that China's big expansion into this area is going to create some very large write-downs as they are coming into a glutted, fully commoditized market at exactly the wrong time. Another factor for all of us to consider is.... what happens in China when the US consumer is forced to curtail his borrowing/spending? China's expansion depends heavily on export markets, especially the US. When the US consumer finally caves in, there will be very consequential consequences in China. How will China handle such a slow-down at this crucial stage of its economic expansion? I sure do not know, but I expect that it will be traumatic. Nor can we expect China's consumers to take up the slack if they are unemployed. Best, Earlie