The retail price of the MacBook Air M2 laptop dropped by VND2.1-3 million (US$89-127) to VND25 million in April and has risen back to VND28 million in May.
The manager of an Apple distributor in Vietnam said retailers might have hiked the price because currently Air M2 inventories in the country are very low.
“If the demand … surges retailers … will have to wait for eight to 10 weeks for the product to be shipped to Vietnam.”
Large retailers such as The Gioi Di Dong, FPT Shop, and CellPhoneS had sold the Air M2 with the minimum configuration, the best-selling version, for VND28 million in early April, VND25.9 million in mid-April, and VND25 million in late April.
The laptop first sold for VND32.9 million when launched in Vietnam in July last year, but its price declined sharply partly due to competition among retailers to get a larger share of the pie, according to a manager of a The Gioi Di Dong store.
“Prices of technological products always tend to decrease gradually after launch. However, the continuous up and down with a large amplitude of several million dong in a short period of time shows the instability of the market,” said Nguyen Van Cong, a veteran trader of Apple products.
According to the manager of The Gioi Di Dong, the big discount of MacBook Air M2 is part of its price competition campaign.
In early April, during a shareholder meeting, Nguyen Duc Tai, Chairman of The Gioi Di Dong (Mobile World), said: “The price at The Gioi Di Dong was sometimes million dong higher than that at other retailers. However, this phenomenon will stop. We will not let the price difference become an advantage for competitors.”
Refusing to give the reason for their price fluctuations, managers of CellPhoneS and FPT Shop said MacBook prices have been “actively updated by the stores based on business strategies and the general situation in the market.”
In fact, the top three Apple device retailers in Vietnam, The Gioi Di Dong, FPT Shop and CellPhoneS, have changed the laptop’s prices frequently in recent days and the prices are almost the same.
At some Apple stores, it is one of the two best-selling laptops along with the MacBook Air with the M1 chip.