Hewlett-Packard has made a play out of Macroeconomics 101. Create scarcity for a popular good or service, and you drive demand.Less than 10 days ago, HP announced it would stop producing its TouchPad tablet computer — because, you know, it just could not sell any, and TouchPads sat there, unloved and unsold, on BestBuy’s shelves — and liquidated its remaining TouchPads, dropping the price from $349 to $99. The newly discounted TouchPad was a huge hit, and now HP says it will make a few more TouchPads to sell at that reduced price. (It is not, however, going back to webOS operations permanently.)
“Since we announced the price drop, the number of inquiries about the product and the speed at which it disappeared from inventory has been stunning,” HP spokesman Mark Budgell wrote on HP’s blog. “It’s safe to say we were pleasantly surprised by the response.”
Assuming it costs $306 to make each TouchPad, HP will see a $207 loss per tablet, according to Wall Street Journal estimates.
HP will decide later how many TouchPads it’ll make and when they’ll become available, but it will release this latest run before Oct. 31, according to Budgell’s blog post. The company will offer a 16-gigabyte version for $100 and a 32-gigabyte version for $150. When the tablets go on sale, HP will limit one TouchPad per customer.
And HP is certainly dealing with something they never faced before the 80-percent price reduction. “We can’t promise we’ll have enough for everyone,” Budgell wrote.
Read more at The New York Times.
