Foreign computer makers appear to be offering more aggressive discounts than Taiwanese makers at this year's Taipei Computer Application Show, which opened yesterday at the Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall.
"This time we are offering the lowest-price notebooks that IBM Taiwan has ever offered in our history," said Lisa Chen (陳慧純), a marketing executive at IBM Taiwan.
The IBM ThinkPad R notebooks, powered by Intel Celeron1.13 GHz processors, which usually cost NT$45,000 each, are on sale at the show for NT$37,999.
Hewlett-Packard Co has also cut the prices of its laptops by up to NT$7,000. "Consumers expect bargains, and we will never let them down," said Dennis Chen (陳敬宏), group sales manager at HP Taiwan.
HP's Presario 700 notebook -- which was selling last year at NT$49,000 -- is now available at NT$41,900, 14.5 percent off its usual price, he said.
HP is also offering a "special package" to customers. "If they buy any of our Compaq Presario PCs, they get an HP jet printer for free," Chen said.
The company is hoping to sell 3,000 laptops and 800 PCs at the show, he said.
"Based on our previous experience, sales we generate from the show account for 10 to 12 percent of the company's annual PC and notebook sales," HP's Chen said.
While foreign makers are slashing their prices, domestic makers are making more conservative cuts.
Karl Chen (陳瑞豐), a director at Acer Inc (宏電), said discounts on the Acer Pentium IV notebooks were around NT$2,000 to NT3,000 on average, with the TravelMate 270 models going for about NT$50,900 each.
Digital cameras are another hotly contested battleground at the show, with international brands such as Fuji, Olympus, Sony, Kodak, Nikon and Canon trying to attract buyers with freebies rather than discounts.
"We offer a gift set including a new battery, a memory card and a leather case, worth NT$1,800 in total, to customers who buy one of our Fuji FinePix models," said Ko Keng-yu, a local Fuji retailer.
Ko said there was little opportunity for discounting digital cameras at the moment because new models were being released every couple of months, which automatically brought down prices 10 percent.
The five-day show is open from 9am to 7pm until Monday. Admission is NT$200.
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