The price of Cheap

[JustInspired]

"Acer's financial results suggest that it has made a loss on almost every PC it has sold since the second quarter of 2011. Its best performance in that space was in the second quarter of 2012 - when for every PC it sold, it made an average profit of just $1.13."

And we wonder why Lenovo installed SuperFish and PCs are so full of trialware, crapware etc...it's probably the only reason the manufacturers are still 'surviving'.
The consumers wanted the cheapest. Well we got it.

The article is a year old but I'm sure it is still just as real today.

http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-trap-windows-chrome-hp-dell-lenovo-asus-acer

 

[AlaDes]

Manufacturers are about making money. Technicians, like us on technibble, are usually about quality and service (although we have to make money, quality and service come first). Manufacturers make their money on how many units they sell, along with all of the other services they sell (usually crap-ware in our terms). Although I refrain from term term "crap-ware" when explaining my sales to a potential client (trust me, I am not a salesman by any means), I hate the way manufacturers do this. However, it's to my advantage and it actually makes myself money because after a while my clients begin to see the light of how the manufacturers sell their products so cheap, especially when I explain marketing to them.

Companies like mentioned don't make money on how many units they sell. For all they care, they can lose money on the actual machine itself and still make money hand over fists. Yeah, that's right, I said they don't care if they lose money on their units, because they don't!

Let's go to marketing techniques. Most companies think like the one mentioned. And how's that you ask? The same way television has gotten by with this for years: ADVERTISING! Yep, that's right...good old advertising. All of the "crap-ware" is simply advertising, However, unlike television, it hasn't paid off in the PC market and probably never will, because consumers aren't in the market for the "extras", they are in the market for "what will get the job done". Heck, why pay for the extras when we get all we need for $200 bucks?

I know many techs on here get disappointed in the way our market is going. However, this forum should give you some hope. Simply keep doing what you are doing when it comes to quality and service and it will soon prevail. Btw...who wants to go out and buy a $200 PC just to have to go through the aggravation of paying one of us to transfer all of the data from one PC to the other every year?

 

[katz]

I didn't read the whole story, but that must be some creative number crunching to arrive at an average profit of just $1.13 per pc.