Medison Celebrity just released a laptop that aims to be the cheapest laptop in the world, priced at only $150.
On their website, http://www.medisoncelebrity.com/ they present a laptop with:
# Intel® Celeron 1.5 GHz CPU
# 14″ Widescreen X-bright LCD
# 256 MB Ram memory
# 40 GB Hard Drive
# 802.11g Wireless LAN
but HOW DO THEY DO IT?
What I think their business model is:
If they buy laptops for $250 (directly from China) and they sell them for $150, they get a loss of around $100/laptop. If you add shipping and labor(installing Linux), you get a loss of about $140/laptop. However, if they could sell advertisement on their website, and because of the “scam look”, they would have a very low ROI (0.02%), it is possible for them to make a profit.
For ex.: They have 1 million visitors checking out the product, but only 200 actually buy a laptop, that’s a $28.000 loss, but I believe advertising to a million people would cover that and make a small profit (if you’re an advertising expert, drop a line on this forum).
They could make huge money if they ship laptops with Google as default search engine (with their own adsense ID build in the system) and setup the OS with all sorts of ads and affiliate programs (similar to Windows and Apple – iTunes, MSN live, MSN shop, etc.).
This is not a new business model, Mozilla does this with their Firefox browser with comes with a personalized version of Google. Printer manufacturers also do this, when they sell their printers cheap and charge big for accessories. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo also do this, when they sell their consoles at half the manufacturing price, hoping to get a big profit selling the video games.
In fact, according to this article: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.115391 , they really want to make a profit from ads and affiliate systems (or as retailers).
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