Intense competition pushes OEM DVD Writer pricing to ~$40

Just a few days following the price drops announcement for retail DVD writers, OEM quotations have now fallen between 12% and 20% down to around $40.  This is the result of intense competition among BenQ, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Lite-On IT, NEC and Pioneer.  

 

Further DVD writer price drops are expected later this year, but at a much smaller level, especially with such a low price margin on these writers already. 

 

OEM quotations for 16x DVD burners have dropped to about US$40 due to intense competition for orders from leading vendors such as Pioneer, NEC, Lite-On IT, BenQ, HLDS (Hitachi-LG Data Storage) and TSST (Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology), according to Taiwan-based makers of optical disc drives (ODDs). The new price represent a drop of 12-20% from the recent OEM prices of US$45-50. However, there is still room for further decreases in the OEM price of 16x DVD burners in the second half of this year, but the cuts are expected to be much smaller, as the vendors' gross margins have already declined to low levels, the sources pointed out.

With such low pricing on OEM DVD writers, it will not be long before these take the place of CD-RW drives in almost all new PCs.  The next expensive drives to take off will be the next generation DVD formats such as Blu-ray and HD DVD and we can expect the price drops and speed increases of these to follow that of CD and DVD writers.

Source: DigiTimes - Systems