Intesting news. Sony already pulled out of the international PDA markets alltogether making it tougher for Palmsource.
Now PalmOne seems to be loosing ground to competition like HP and Asustek. Ofcourse the Chinese market is very difficult when you look at prices the (unoffcial) dealers can offer.
“Digital China and ECS Technology (China), two of PalmOne’s PDA (personal digital assistant) sales agents for the China market, will stop selling PalmOne products in China due to decreasing profits.
PalmOne’s only other general sales agent in China is Worldlink, based in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.
PalmOne selected Digital China to be its first general sales agent in April 2003, and added the other two sales agents afterwards. However, other import channels for Palm PDAs are available to most large retail outlets, at prices 500-800 yuan (US$60-97) per PDA lower than those quoted by the three agents. In addition to the “unofficial” (illegitimate) competition, the three sales agents competed head to head with each other and often discounted prices in their channels, further decreasing their margins.
According to Digital China, margins on a PDAs made by Taiwan-based Asustek Computer are 2-3 times higher than Palm PDA margins, even though marketing costs are higher for Palm products.
ECS Technology complained that PalmOne is not serious about the China market, as the Palm PDA is not really Chinese-language based like Hewlett Packard (HP) and Asustek PDAs.”
Via Digitimes
