Another crackdown in Pantip?!

[phiketpete]

My strong impression is that no it is not over and will not be in the short/medium term .

It is not a one day affair. It has been ongoing for sometime now. Police have been raiding CD stores particularly in Panthip for quite sometime. How it affects the purchaser depends upon the time Panthip is visited as many stores open up as soon as the police leave.

I do sense that the police (or at least someone in a high place) is becoming more serious regarding copyright infringement.

I did posdt a few eeks ago on another thread that a police press anouncement was made at Panthip stating that in future it would not just be those unlucky ones manning the stores that would be arrested and fined but also the actual owners/renters of the sites from where the CD's are being sold.

Hollywood IT down the street from Panthip informed its store owners sometime at the end of last year that it did not appreciate cd's being sold there. Since then there has been a substabtial reduction in the number of outlets selling such products.

I do not see this going away soon.

[ February 25, 2002: Message edited by: phiketpete ]

[Guest]

Does anyone know what the legitimate prices are of these software programs in Thailand? I have a feeling the software companies are selling them at US/European prices, which is ridiculous in Thailand. Thais cannot afford those prices. But maybe I'm wrong. So...what is the legit price of Microsoft Office or whatever in Thailand?

[Palatkik]

quote:

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Originally posted by BadBlintz:

. Thais cannot afford those prices. But maybe I'm wrong.

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I cannot afford them either Looking in Jan02 flyer again from IT City (branches all over Thailand incl Pantip) they have Office XP Pro Thai CD for a cool 26,550B and Office XP Standard Thai AE for 8450B. (I haven't a clue what AE stands for). As for o/s they have WinXP Pro for 15,943B. On the plus side these prices do include VAT.

Cheers,

[ February 25, 2002: Message edited by: Palatkik ]

[Guest]

There is a shop underneath mike shopping mall in Pattaya that used to sell copied software. I drove by there a few days ago and there was only legit stuff on the shelves. Looked like it was a very recent change - in fact a woman was putting stuff up for display as I drove by.

I did hear though that purichai was in town, so maybe that had something to do with it...

[ALHOLK]

Hi!

worldwalker

That shop was real expesive so no big loss.

When I was ther about 6 weeks ago there was another shop on 2:nd rd. close to Pattaya thai. Do you know if it is still in operation. It was much cheaper.

regards

ALHOLK

[ February 27, 2002: Message edited by: ALHOLK ]

[adikgede]

Fellows, so that I don't have to start moderating this discussion, please do not ask or tell where a person might purchase pirated software besides Pantip Plaza. It seems to common knowledge that pirated software is for sale at Pantip, but when folks start talking about alternate venues, it begins to smell like market intelligence.

My own feeling is that commercial productivity software should be free for personal use, but I don't market the software so I am not in a place where I govern the terms of sale.

Pirated software is stolen software so if you have to talk about how and where to steal it do it on a private channel. This way it does not appear as though this board is violating the TOS between nanaplaza.com and the host that is keeping it spinning.

Thanks.

[Guest]

So it seems the Thais are supposed to pay western prices for legit software, even though their pay scales are about 1/10 to 1/50th those of Westerners. This is real hypocrisy on the part of the software companies, who probably benefit from using cheap Asian labor in many aspects of their business.

[Guest]

So, I guess by your logic Mercedes-Benz should price their sedans at $4,000 each in Thailand, rather than $200,000 each, because the Thai make so much less money than the Germans?

Methinks you need to find a good community college and enroll in Econ 101...

[Guest]

Post deleted by DoxyBlue

[Guest]

quote:

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Originally posted by db_sed_aloha:

Country A has a per capita income of $2000 and a market for 500,000 copies of a piece of software.

Country B has a per capita income of $20,000 and a market for 5,000,000 copies of a piece of software.

The software is priced at $100. The net profit per unit is $5 which yields a revenue goal for this product [worldwide in our little model] of $27.5 million.

Now you want to tip over the apple cart and change the price in country A. If you knock the price down to match the diference in per capita income, you'd sell it for $10 which is a net loss of $85 per unit or $-42.5 million.

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The problem with this analysis is that you're assuming a flat demand curve for country A. That is, if the company lowered the price in country A to, say $50, it'd still be selling 500,000 copies.

If you dropped the price to $50 they company would actually be selling more copies, maybe even more than enough to make up for the lost profit per unit. The optimal price to maximize profit from country A and country B is not the same, because their 'demand curves' are not the same.

Not sure, but I think the few foreign companies that bother to make thai language versions of their software (Windows OS, Office, popular games) do indeed discount these versions. They are after all trying to maximize profit from Thailand, and pricing themselves above what almost anybody can pay does not serve them very well.

As for selling English versions in Thailand at a discount rate... Theoretically it's possible since the gross margins are so high on software that you could steeply discount in Thailand and still make a profit per unit.

The problem is this is very open to abuse since American/european would just set up dummy foreign companies to get the discount rate, or foreign companies would start selling in US. Arbitrage essentially... But, I dunno, maybe there are already inforcable laws for 'export only' software.