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By Chino S. Leyco, Researcher
SAMSUNG Electronics Philippines
Corp. is capitalizing on the popularity of MP3 players with plans of
snatching a tenth of the domestic market for the music-playing
gadget.
In a briefing, Jerry Raymond L.
Lacson, marketing manager for the local unit of the Korean
electronics giant, said the company targets to corner a 10-percent
share of the still growing market for MP3 players this year.
He estimates the number of
Filipinos owning mobile MP3 players at 170,000 last year. This year,
the number could rise to 250,000, or a 47-percent increase year on
year.
“We launched all the MP3s last
December, but this year we’re starting to be really strict on how
we’ll put our MP3s in the local market,” Lacson told reporters.
He said that Apple’s popular
iPod music player holds a strong 70-percent market share.
“We initially thought that we
have to price ourselves higher than the iPod, but we realized that
since iPod is a culture already, we have to find a sweet spot, which
is a little beat lower than the competitor,” he added.
On April 11 Steve Jobs, Apple
chief executive, said that it has sold that day its 100,000,000th
iPod, making it the fastest-selling music player in history. The
first iPod was sold in November 2001.
Lacson, however, said that
Samsung’s music players are 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than
those of its rivals.
“Our K3, K4 and K5 music
players will be very affordable, [with] prices are ranging from
P7,990 to P11,490,” he said.
Samsung Electronics is a global
leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and
digital convergence technologies with parent company sales of $63.4
billion and net income of $8.5 billion last year.
The company has sold 6.4 million
units of televisions last year, making it the second-largest vendor
in the Philippines in terms of unit sales.
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