Samsung Philippines Director for IT Eric Sulit holding the company's newly released Series 9 ultrabook, part of the lineup refresh it announced on Monday.
MANILA, Philippines — South Korean technology giant Samsung claimed early dominance of the ultrabook market in the Philippines as it reportedly outsold all of its competitors combined in the first month of availability, a ranking executive said Monday.
Citing data from market research firm GfK Asia, Eric Sulit, director for IT at Samsung Electronics Philippines Corp. (SEPCO), said all the 1000 Series 5 notebooks it brought in last March has since been depleted, signifying hiked market interest for the high-priced notebooks.
“It is a proof that we are able to bring to market and sell very well all these new and innovative products,” Sulit declared.
Because of this, Sulit said Samsung has already garnered the number two spot in local market share for notebooks in terms of value, suggesting that the company reaped revenues mostly from high-margin products just two years after launching the product segment in the country.
The Samsung executive boldly declared that 2012 will be the “year of Samsung notebooks, smartphones, and tablets,” even as its laptop segment grew at a modest pace — from 11 percent to 16 percent year-on-year — in the first quarter of the year due to supply constraints, particularly in hard drives.
Nonetheless, the company — which had already cemented dominance in the global smartphone market — is bullish about its notebook offerings in the country as it announced price cuts for its ultrabook lineup.
“We were very encouraged by the [financial] results that we decided to update our ultrabook lineup,” Sulit said.
The cuts begin with the upgraded Core i7 model for the Series 5 lineup, which now features the newly released Ivy Bridge processor delivering burstable speeds of up to 3.0 GHz; a graphics card powered by NVIDIA’s Kepler GPU; and bumped-up SSD cache of 24GB.
The Core i7 model will now retail at P54,900, down from P59,900 in April. The Core i5 ultrabook will now be sold at P42,900 from P44,900, while a newly introduced Core i3 model can be bought at a price point of P38,900.
Samsung also introduced on Monday its high-end ultrabook in the Series 9 lineup, a unit fitted in a unibody chassis that is 21 percent thinner and 28 percent smaller than its Series 5 brothers.
“Our engineers have been working the past year to give you the best notebook you will ever experience,” Sulit said.
The Series 9 ultrabook is fitted with one of Samsung’s SuperBright screens, which promises as much as 400nit brightness, perfect for enjoying high-definition movies. It also comes with a third-generation Intel Core i5 processor, a 128GB SSD drive, and up to 7 hours of battery life.
The high-end ultrabook, which Sulit said is targeted at professionals and power users, will retail locally for P76,900 beginning next week.
