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Electronics India has announced a hike in the price of its monitors
owing to the constant escalation of input costs. Due to the increase
in prices of LCD and LED panels in the international market, LG
intends to hike its monitor prices in India. But this announcement
has not gone down well with the company's partners and they are
debating on the shrinking market size of LG monitors.
According to
Dr YV Verma, COO, LG, “Due to continuous increase in panel prices
internationally, it has become imperative for us to consider the
price hike in India. Though for the last 3 months, we have been
absorbing the panel cost which contributes approximately 70% of a
finish set cost, but it will be difficult to continue this in the
time to come.
The new
prices will be applicable from May 2011. The impact of the price hike
would be seen in all LG monitors staring from 15.6" to 23"
(LCD, LED, and Monitor TV) and the prices will increase by at least
3-5%.
Commenting
on
the price hike Harish Puri, CEO, Compute
Empire, a Delhi-based LG retailer said, “We are least
bothered about the price hike announcement because we don't think
this price hike will make any impact on partners and consumers. LG is
no more a major player in the monitor market. Now, there are various
brands like AOC, ViewSonic and Acer who are doing good business and
selling at a lower price than LG. We keep getting such SMSes on price
hike from LG's sales team on a daily basis. This is nothing but a
pressure tactic on partners, so that partners can stock more
products. As of now, we are selling LG monitors at the old rate card
and will continue to sell at the same price, despite any increase in
price.”
Similarly,
Aligarh based Yatendra Sharma, proprietor
Sun
Tec Systems, a regional distributor for LG said, “We
have not heard of any price hike on monitors from the company, and we
have been selling the monitors at the existing pricing. However, if
there is any price hike, it will certainly impact our sales. We want
the company to roll back the pricing.”
On the other
hand, Manish Jain, director, Jain Peripherals said, “We have
implemented the new 4-5% price increase in our billing systems. This
is a marginal increase in pricing and this will not impact the
resellers' market. Earlier, we were selling 16'' monitor at Rs 4,500
and now it costs Rs 150 more.”
Puri
also informed about poor and degraded service support of LG. “There
has been a decline in the market size of the LG IT products. The
company makes false commitments to channel partners and the channel
policy has been redundant for quite some time now. Moreover, LG has
not cleared our pending
backend schemes for the last 3
months.”
Meanwhile, Magan Gangani,
director of Nashik-based Newtrack Computers said, "Hike in LG
monitor prices has impacted our business tremendously as our sales
have been hit by 10-15%. Instead of pushing LG, we have started
focusing on rival products."