By Truong Dang
Selling prices of Huawei’s smartphones are taking a dive on Vietnamese e-commerce websites, almost a month after the American government restricted companies in the U.S. from supplying products to the Chinese company, according a new research by price aggregator iPrice Group.
A clear decline
iPrice recorded selling prices of Huawei smartphones across all major e-commerce platforms in the country, then averaged them and mapped out their movements. To ensure accuracy, iPrice also excluded all short-term sales campaigns and the ten Huawei phone models chosen to analyse are those officially released in either 2018 or 2019.
The final result shows that in Vietnam, at the 3-week mark after news of the ban came out, most of the ten models are now being sold for at least 200,000 VND less. This might not seem much, but the report also notes that during the same time period before the ban, these models’ prices were actually on the rise.
This sharp turn in pricing trend means that the ban has had a negative effect on Huawei’s popularity among Vietnamese consumers.
In particular, among the ten models analysed, five appear to have had a clear decline in selling price, two stopped the price increase trend they were experiencing before the ban, and only three see no changes.
The most noteworthy case belongs to Huawei Mate 20. Despite being a fairly new model, being released in October 2018, its selling price has decreased by a whopping amount of 4.7 million VND within just three weeks. Similarly, its more luxurious sister – Mate 20 Pro, also witnessed a 200,000 VND decrease.
Commenting on these significant results, an iPrice representative attributes them to both the ban and the upcoming release of Huawei Mate 30 Pro – a new flagship phone from the Chinese company. These two events happening around the same time are making Vietnamese retail merchants anxious, leading them to decrease Mate 20’s price to clear stock.
Affecting mid-ranged and high-ranged products
All seven models experiencing decline in price belong to the mid-to-high range, while cheaper models with price below seven million VND remained largely unaffected.
It means that even though Vietnamese consumers still have a strong demand for cheap Huawei products, they are being more cautious when it comes to more expensive options, such as the Huawei Mate 20, which affects market prices of these smartphones.
Vietnam seeing stronger reactions than other countries
Besides Vietnam, similar researches were conducted by iPrice in five other Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
According to these researches, 3 weeks after the ban came into effect, prices of the seven analysed Huawei smartphone models decreased by 27 USD in Vietnam, 33 USD in Indonesia, and 52 USD in the Philippines on average.
Meanwhile, opposite results were found in the remaining three countries as no significant changes in prices were recorded in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.
Explaining for this disparity, iPrice representatives cite statistics from web analytics company Statcounter GlobalStats which show that Huawei smartphones are much more popular in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, owning more than 10% of market share in each of these countries, while remain with only 3.13% of market share in Vietnam by May 2019. Being less favoured among Vietnamese in general, Huawei’s products are more prone to price drops due to bad publicity.
Source iPrice Group