The man who so nearly brought us the Android is not going down without a fight. Melbourne, Australia, based-entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan says he’s planning to cut prices at a time when major manufacturers are either getting out of the business or flagging major increases.

He’s back, and threatening trouble for the IT and consumer electronics industries. All this two weeks after his disastrous attempt to launch a low-cost Android mobile phone in Australia,

In a media statement Kogan Technologies said it will be maintaining or lowering the price on all of its consumer electronics goods, including Samsung-based LCD TVs, GPS receivers, Blu-ray DVD players and video cameras, despite ‘big name manufacturers’ announcing significant price hikes from
February.

This covers Kogan’s full range of HD LCD TVs, Blu-ray players, GPS devices and video cameras, the statement said. Price cuts would include a 47-inch 1080p LCD TV chopped from $1899 to $1699; a 42-inch 1080p KCD TV down from $1499 to $1299; and a Blu-ray player from $349 to $249.

However a Web site listing suggested the cuts might not be permanent.

Ruslan Kogan said NEC’s forthcoming departure from the Australian consumer electronics and PC markets would further decrease competition. He said NEC was joining Hitachi, Fujitsu and Philips who had ceased consumer electronics sales.

Ruslan Kogan said, “It’s proof that when times get tough, the big players are not fast or flexible enough to cope with changes in the Australian market.”

Claiming that Australian consumers have been waiting for post-Christmas sales to buy a big-screen TV are in for a ‘rude shock’, Kogan says that, with only several major manufacturers left in the television industry in Australia and New Zealand, prices are set to rise.

He said:

While everyone is raising prices, we’ll be lowering them,’ he claims. ‘I know where these companies get their components and have their manufacturing facilities ­ and for the most part it’s in exactly the same place that I get Kogan’s products. The prices at point of manufacture are not increasing in percentage terms in line with what the big companies are claiming.

This points to the massive inefficiencies in the supply chain between manufacturers and consumers. Kogan cuts all the middlemen out, passing on the savings and cheaper prices directly to customers.

Yes, yes. We get the point. From this savior of the consumer we will be able to get cheap tellies. But what happened to the Android for which some people laid out read money and Ruslan Kogan made a song and dance at CER. He claims insider connections in the Chinese manufacturing industry did not pay off, however, when he recently sought to launch two mobile smartphones using the open-source Android operating system from Google.

The ‘Agora’ phones, priced at $399 and $299, were to have been shipped from yesterday, but Kogan pulled them from the market two weeks ago after receiving advice that they did not meet ‘interoperability’ issues.

Or, as inside sources state, did not work very well. Odd, but identical models were on sale on the Chinese site AliBaba from whence the originals almost certainly came.

Despite this withdrawal, Kogan claims the online store has achieved 20% month-on-month growth for the last three years. He has said he still intends to launch Android phones this year. Let us not hold our breath.

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Entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 6:21 am under Advertising.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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