“The lines are too long. We are suspending business,” said the posters hung underneath the BenQ LCD TV sign. This was the scene at the Hong Kong Computer Festival in Sham Shui Po (深水土步) yesterday. An annual event since 2003, the festival runs for four days from 5 to 8 December 2008 on the streets near the Golden Computer Arcade. According to the media, the festival attracted 220,000 visitors in the first two days with sales totalling HK$110,000,000 (US$14,102,564). Where is the financial tsunami?
Chojiro braved the crowd and visited the festival twice on Saturday, 6 December, once in the early afternoon with his friend Stephen and once again at night with his friend Arthur. In a rather abnormal behaviour, Chojiro contributed only a tiny bit to the total sales. He bought a 2GB SanDisk M2 memory card (for use in his wife’s new Sony Ericsson W380 mobile phone) for HK$99 (US$12.69). Cheap? May be. Stephen, always frugal, didn’t buy anything. But Arthur’s was a different story. Equiping his new home, Arthur bought a Acer Aspire One netbook (white, Windows XP Home, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 6-cell battery) for HK$3,298 (US$422), a Belkin Wireless N WIFI Router with 4 Gigabit Ports for HK$1,190 (US$152), and a 3-meter DVI-VGA cable for HK$80 (US$10.25). Chojiro regretted that he had bought the same netbook (blue, used it to write this post) one month too early. He paid HK$3,700 (US$474) after hard bargaining from the list price of HK$3,998 (US$512).
From observation on the street and inside the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) station, most people bought netbooks and BenQ LCD monitors. People lined up for BenQ monitors, which were probably offered at extremely attractive prices. Chojiro didn’t bother checking. He doesn’t need one right now.
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