Price cuts spark laptop tit-for-tat

Pricing Dell cut the price of its portables - so everyone else has too.

Dell and Toshiba have sparked a price war among manufacturers aftertoo. announcing aggressive reductions to their laptop ranges, forcing others to revise their own strategies.

Peter Watts, Dell UK product manager, revealed the company had slashed the price of its Latitude CP range by up to 17 per cent on 6 January, which Dell said was not a price war tactic, but was meant to reduced costs. But the following day, Toshiba cut prices across its laptop range by up to 23 per cent.

Other vendors have since followed suit. Hewlett Packard disclosed notebook price cuts by up to 16 per cent on its Omnibook notebook PCs on 7 January.

Ted Speroni, European notebook marketing manager for Hewlett Packard, admitted the firm watched competitors' movements as they affected its own prices. 'Manufacturers can add all kinds of features, but at the end of the day you have to have competitive prices,' he said.

IBM expressed surprise over Dell's reductions, having cut the prices of its own laptops in November last year. Katharine Sharp, business manager for IBM's Thinkpad notebooks, said the vendor will be responding to the more recent action of its competitors. 'We shall now be bringing forward our price reductions, planned for the beginning of February, and a new list of notebook prices should be available within the next few days,' she said.

Compaq insisted it would not be announcing any price cuts as its laptops were all now within the channel. It has, however, introduced notebooks this week for the home market, using chips from Cyrix in its Presario range, a departure from exclusive use of Intel processors in its laptops.

Brian Green, PC business manager at Toshiba distributor Interface Systems International, said any competitive pricing would stimulate the corporate market and take pressure off traditionally busy March/April sales. He agreed the biggest driving force behind the price cuts - certainly for Toshiba - was the price cuts announced by Intel late last year, adding that the percentage of the price drops was similar to expected Intel reductions. 'There is a bit of a price war going on, but it's mostly Toshiba trying not to seem like it's following Intel,' he said.

All prices are based on the approximate equivalent of the Dell Latitude CP M233XT with 233MHz Intel mobile Pentium processor with MMX technology, 13.3" XGA active matrix TFT screen running 1024 X 768 resolution, 32Mb of Ram, 3.2Gb hard drive, 20x (max variable) 11x (min variable) CD-Rom drive, 3.5" floppy diskette drive and Windows 95. All prices exclude VAT and delivery.