Samsung Electronics and Lenovo have recently started a wave of price cuts for their tablets in the US market. Samsung offered price cuts for its 7- and 10-inch models, but their prices are still higher than those of its competitors. Lenovo reduced the price of its 8- and 10-inch entry-level tablets, further enhancing the devices' competitiveness in the market. Lenovo's 10-inch 16GB model is now priced below US$180.
Meanwhile, Asustek Computer's T100 and Acer's Switch 10 2-in-1s are seeing their prices gap narrow.
For the US' 7-inch 8GB tablet market segment, to counter its significant shipment drop in the second quarter, Samsung, in August, reduced the retail price of its 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 Lite from US$149 to US$139, decreasing its price gap with other competitors' mainstream devices to only around US$10. Samsung also reduced its 7-inch Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 from US$199 to US$179, but the price point is still over US$30 more expensive than similar-level devices from competitors, Digitimes Research found.
Asustek joined the US' 7-inch 8GB tablet market segment with its US$129 entry-level ME170C. However, compared to Asustek's ME176C released in early June, the ME170C has inferior processor, panel, storage and version of Android, but their price gap is only about US$20, making the ME170C weaker in price/performance ratio than the ME176C.
Meanwhile, Lenovo's 7-inch 8GB tablet, the A7-40 has adopted MediaTek's quad-core solution, but is only priced around US$129. Digitimes Research believes first-tier vendors are trying to preserve as much profit as possible before competition during peak season starts.
Currently, tablet players that are most aggressive over pricing are second-tier vendors that are using solutions from China's supply chain. Hewlett-Packard (HP)'s 7 Plus tablet, which uses a chip solution from China-based Allwinner Technology and is assembled by China-based Neostra, is currently priced below US$100. Toshiba's Excite Go tablet, using Intel's China Tech Ecosystem (CTE) solution is also priced at US$99.