Global technology giants Microsoft, Apple and Adobe were yesterday ordered to appear before a pricing inquiry examining the often higher cost of tech goods in Australia compared with other economies.
The lower house committee holding the probe, which was launched in May last year, said it had summoned the trio to appear at a public hearing next month to explain why Australian customers paid more for the same products.
“The committee is looking at the impacts of prices charged to Australian consumers for IT products,” it said in a statement. “Australian consumers often pay much higher prices for hardware and software than people in other countries.”
The inquiry was set up to examine claims by consumer advocacy groups of price discrimination for Australians on technology, with music, games, software, and gaming and computer hardware costing substantially more than elsewhere.
According to consumer lobby group Choice, Australians pay on average 73 percent more on iTunes downloads than consumers in the US, 69 percent more on computer products and 232 percent more on PC game downloads.
Office software was on average 34 percent more expensive in Australia compared with the US, Choice said in its submission to the inquiry, with hardware coming in at 41 percent more expensive.
One software package was A$8,665 (US$8,939) more expensive to buy in Australia than the US — a gap that Choice described as “particularly unreasonable.”
“For this amount, it would be cheaper to employ someone for 46 hours at the price of US$21.30 per hour and fly them to the US and back at your expense — twice,” Choice said.
Choice only did comparisons to the US and Britain; the inquiry is examining discrepancies with these countries as well as with Asia-Pacific economies.
Apple and Microsoft have both made their own submissions to the committee, arguing that prices differed across jurisdictions due to a range of factors including freight, local taxes and duties, and foreign exchange rates.
The Australian Information Industry Association, which represents Adobe and other major information and communications technology firms, has submitted to the committee that the “costs of doing business in Australia are higher than in many other countries.”
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
RSS