Issue #0518/2 - A price tag of £826 in the UK was clearly ‘out of sync’ with pricing elsewhere in Europe. Oki reviews the price at launch.
Having originally set the price of the Oki C5510 MFP in the UK at £869 while it was priced at €1,049 in Germany, Oki has had second thoughts regarding its pricing policy.
Having carefully checked and queried the proposed UK pricing with Oki, TCPglobal Issue #0516 - "… and HP makes three" carried the following two paragraphs in its article about the new colour MFP.
<< Considering the German price is €1,049, which translates to about £750, the UK price seems rather on the high side. Furthermore, relative pricing of other products in Germany would have suggested pricing in the UK on the C5510 could have been closer to £650.
Clearly, had it been priced at £649, or even £749, the Oki C5510 MFP would have represented red-hot value, competing aggressively with the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 2820AiO – as does the C3100 printer against the Colour LaserJet 2550L (£399 against £304). At £869 however, although still an enormously high value product – at 12ppm colour and 20ppm mono – it may struggle to compete with the Colour LaserJet 2820AiO, which produces 19ppm in mono even though its 4-pass engine is restricted to 4ppm. >>
Now, on formal launch of the device, the price of the C5510 MFP has been set as “Less than £700” – presumably meaning £699. This price position is exactly halfway between the two prices identified by TCPglobal as the two benchmarks for pricing in the UK.
Representing a reduction of 20% on the original price, £699 reduces the 3-year long-term Cost Per Page from 3.54 pence to 3.45 pence – 2.5% - a relatively small, but useful, reduction.
However, from Oki’s perspective, this is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that the new price will make the device immensely more attractive to potential customers, meaning greater potential for sales and this is what the company needs to maximise the profitability of the device.
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