Research in Motion’s (RIM) PlayBook tablet is scheduled to launch in Indonesia in August, news that should have set the country’s legions of BlackBerry fans alight with anticipation. Instead, the announcement was met with an indifferent shrug — PlayBooks have been available on the country’s thriving technology black market for weeks.
Vicky, a vendor at Mall Ambassador in Jakarta, a bustling hub for all things electronic, had stocks of the PlayBook last month, even ahead of the product’s global launch in New York.
“I’m not sure exactly where these are from. They come here on boats. We usually get stuff like this from Mexico or the US,” she said.
Analysts say the black market costs the government millions of dollars in unpaid consumption taxes, but it is happy to turn a blind eye to the illegal trade because telecommunications generate so much money in other ways.
“All those satellites and antennas you see on top of buildings, they are funded by the private sector. So the government is now sitting pretty collecting bandwidth money,” Debnath Guharoy of Roy Morgan market research said. “They are issuing licences worth millions of dollars which costs them nothing, really. I don’t think the black market is going away.”
Capitalizing on Indonesian technophiles who just cannot wait until August, Vicky jacked up the PlayBook’s retail price to 9.75 million rupiah (US$975) compared with US$699 for the most expensive version in the US, but come August, PlayBooks will be selling at slashed prices alongside cut-rate smartphones, netbooks and cameras. Affluent Indonesians are already lapping up cheap hand-held tablets.
The country’s latest sex scandal involved a conservative Muslim lawmaker who was busted watching pornography on his Samsung Galaxy tablet in parliament.
Suhanda Wijaya, of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said it was impossible to control shipments of illegal products into a huge country of 17,000 islands.
“Indonesia is very open because it is an archipelago. We can only really monitor five major gateways,” he said.
On top of evading the 10 percent luxury tax, suppliers and vendors can also ignore the 5 percent sales tax by trading solely in cash, making for significantly cheaper products.
“Smuggling goods into the country hurts the industry because it makes it very difficult for companies that want to do the right thing to compete with cheaper products,” Wijaya said.
It can be impossible to tell the difference between a smuggled product and an authorized one. The difference is only in the warranty card. An authorized product will have a manufacturer’s warranty, while a smuggled one will have a distributor’s warranty.
RIM Southeast Asia managing director Gregory Wade said the Canadian company is trying to educate consumers about the benefits of buying legitimate products.
“We’ve run a number of campaigns wrapped around the concept ‘peace of mind’ and the values and benefits of purchasing authorized products. We continue to support and invest very heavily into that,” he said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the