Electronics Price Wars: Shoppers' Gain

Russia's consumer electronics market is growing quickly, but so is competition, representatives of foreign firms said this week at a Moscow trade show.Andrei Sviridov, trade coordinator for Panasonic, said that the consumer electronics market has completely changed over the last year as new firms have emerged on the Russian scene. He said newcomers are selling their goods at discounts of up to 40 percent to win the market."They cannot survive without this on the Russian market," he said.In order to compete, he said, Panasonic has cut prices for its products by about 13 percent over the past year, resulting in a 60-percent sales boost.The increased competition was evident this week as some 300 consumer electronics firms packed the Krasnaya Presnya Exhibition Center for the second annual Everything for the Home trade show, which continues through Friday.Vera Bogoyavlenskaya, a representative of Korean firm Daewoo, which was registered in Russia only in February, said company representatives make regular rounds of Moscow shops to track the prices of competitor Sony."Our company's prices must be between $100 and $150 lower than Sony's to keep us going," she said. Lee Georgy, Daewoo's sales manager, said that monthly turnover has already grown to more than $1 million. He said Daewoo plans to launch a television advertising campaign in September.Walter Ehrnecker, a Sony advertising promotion manager, said Sony is seeking to maintain its market share through a dealer network that stresses quality and service. Ehrnecker said that one major Moscow dealer has plans to invest $500,000 in a new store on the fashionable Kutuzovsky Bulvar this September, and will launch a dozen smaller Sony professional shops by this fall.Mariya Nenakhova, a marketing representative from Siemens, said the company holds special seminars for shop assistants to teach them to present Siemens goods and explain their advantages as compared to other firms' products. Sviridov of Panasonic said that Russian consumers are quickly becoming more experienced and sophisticated in their choices of electronic goods."Previously customers called our office and asked whether our TV sets were color or not, but now they sometimes ask such difficult technical questions we cannot answer at once," he said.