Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Not all companies do this, however. Eg, Amazon have extremely equitable pricing; the Kindle costs, in other countries, pretty much a direct conversion of the US price plus the relevant local taxes. Sony certainly leave one with a certain impression that high prices in other countries are perhaps being used to subsidize the price in the US market.
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Or perhaps Amazon uses it US revenues to subsidize its foreign prices?
(They're eee-vile, after all.)
Do consider Amazon is primarily in the content business, not the hardware business. And they run the Kindle hardware business on a global basis, unlike their ebook business. To them a US Kindle sale is bookkept at the same price as a non-US sale. They obviously arent expecting the Kindles to carry any local overhead.
I agree that Sony does labor under the impression that their non-US prices are higher, but Sony seems to expect their various regional units to be independently profitable. So if their european costs are higher, they have no choice but to pass them on to the consumer. (And they don't have anywhere near the content revenues that Amazon has.)
I've long thought Son'y biggest mistake in the ebook business was getting epub religion and dropping lrf.
edit: Hmm, I'm thinking Amazon's Kindle pricing is very probably the result of treating Kindles as just another product: they buy them at a fixed price from the supplier, add a standard markup, and that is the selling price. By not treating it as a part of their business, its price ends up independent of local operating costs and can thus directly track currency rates. This is not an option for Sony.
(Amazon's IT is "free" to their storefronts because it is a profit center in its own right, due to their B2B product lines. And Bezos has in fact said they expect Kindles and the ebookstore to be independently self-financing.)