VietNamNet Bridge – Modern ultrabooks priced at a little over VND10 million have appeared on the shelves of supermarkets instead of the products with sky high prices of VND15 million dong and higher.

In 2012, the domestic laptop market witnessed the noisy appearance of new ultrabook models with foreign big brands like HP, Asus, Acer, Sony, Lenovo, Samsung.

Though the ultrabook market has always been dominated by foreign brands, a Vietnamese technology group, CMC, still unexpectedly jumped into the boiling market in mid-November 2012.

There are three ultrabook market segments at this moment. The first one gathers the high end products valued at VND30 million and higher. The second one is medium class product group priced at VND20-30 million, and the third is the popular one with the price below VND20 million.

With fashionable design and light weight of less than two kilos and the thickness of no more than 20 mm, ultrabooks have been hunted by people, who want the products to replace traditional laptops which are heavier and more inconvenient to carry. Especially, powerful ultrabooks also have high class features, such as the long use (6 hours) battery, strong processing speed with configuration of Core i3, i5 and i7.

However, such the ultrabooks which can satisfy all users’ requirements were very “choosy” about customers, because they are relatively expensive. One needed to spend at least VND15 million to buy a product.

However, with the appearance of a series of new products, one just needs to spend from VND10 million to VND13 million to by an ultrabook with Core i3, 1.8 kilo in weight, 14 inch screen, 4GB RAM, 320-500GB capacity of hardware, 4 cell battery with integrated DVD drive.

Dell Inspiron 14Z BMW Z4, for example, is priced at VND12.7 million dong, Asus S46CA-WX016 at VND11.9 million dong, Asus K46CA-WX013 10.6-10.9 million dong.

As for the “new comer” U135-S NoteOne of Vietnamese CMC group, the product with Core i3 is now selling at VND12.9 million dong. However, the price levels believed to make the CMC’s products less competitive than the products of other brands which have the prices just a bit higher than CMC’s but have better brands.

Some hi-tech production shops in Hanoi have been selling products with foreign well-known brands, but they are not the imports through the official channel. They are the products carried to Vietnam across the border gates by travelers or foreigners.

The owners of the shops explain that since the products do not bear the high import tariffs, they have the sale prices lower than the products imported through official channels. In general, these products are cheaper by VND300,000-500,000.

As such, ultrabooks have become more approachable than several months ago. The appearance of a lot of ultrabook models has brought more choices to users, who now have more choices that fit their budget of VND10 million dong.

Those, who bought popular models of ultrabooks in late 2012, were given valuable gifts, such as the bags for ultrabooks, optic mouse, iron or vouchers.

Dinh Anh Huan, General Director of dienmay.com, thinks that the laptop market would still be quiet in the first months of 2013, following the market performance of 2012. Therefore, retailers are likely to launch big sales promotion campaigns to stimulate the demand.

The market surveys conducted by some computer distributors have found out that consumers now tend to prefer the products with medium sale prices, but have fashionable designs, thinner and lighter than the previous generation products.

Buu Dien