Vietnam’s laptop market becoming saturated

April 11, 2016 | 08:30 am GMT+7

The Vietnamese don’t spend as much money on laptops as they did in the past because they have many other choices, from tablets to smartphones.

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The Vietnamese laptop market in 2015 witnessed abmodest growth rate of 2.4 percent in the number of products sold compared with 2014, while the value was nearly the same, according to GfK.

Vnexpress commented that in the past, people bought laptops because the mobile device could satisfy their different demand for both work and entertainment. But nowadays, people only buy laptops for work purposes, and they would choose smartphones and tablets, which have higher mobility, for their entertainment purposes.

Ly Trung Dung from FPT Shop, said that the laptop market’s growth has been slowing  in recent years. Predicting that the trend would continue in 2016, he commented that the market is becoming saturated.

However, Vietnam is still one of the two fastest growing 15-inch laptop markets in South East Asia. In the first three quarters of 2015, Vietnam imported 96,000 laptops more than the same period of the year before.

Computing device distributors noted that the best sellers are models with reasonable prices, reasonable designs, good batteries and good maintenance policies.

Computing device distributors noted that the best sellers are models with reasonable prices, reasonable designs, good batteries and good maintenance policies.

The ‘2-in-1’ laptops which can rotate, flip and detach to be used as tablet or laptop and satisfy both the entertainment and working demand are the most favored.

Retailers have recently launched a series of models of this kind, including Asus Transformer Book T200TA, Acer Switch 10, Lenovo Yoga 500 and HP Stoli Pavillon X2, priced at between VND8 million and VND12 million.

The market segment of laptops for office workers has seen the appearance of touch-screen products such as ASUS Vivobook S400, Sony Vaio Fit 14E, Lenovo Flex 14, HP Pavilion TouchSmart 14-B151TU or Acer Aspire S7. 

Ultrabook models still have been selling well in Vietnam. Manufacturers have made heavy investment to develop the product series with 15-inch and larger screens, high resolution and Intel Core i7.

However, Nhip Cau Dau Tu reported that Apple’s Macbook series still can attract customers. 

FPT Shop witnessed very satisfactory sales of 12-inch New Macbook in June 2015 when the import volume was short to satisfy demand. In the third quarter of 2015 alone, Macbook brought $5.88 million to Apple.

A report of GfK showed that FTP Shop holds the largest market share in laptop distribution. Every 13 out of 100 laptops sold in Vietnam in 2015 came from FPT Shop, which means 13 percent market share for the distributor. 

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