Alienware pricing in SA: how do we compare?

When Alienware laptops were launched in South Africa in October 2010, Dell promised that the price would be no more than 10% higher than the equivalent pricing in the U.S.

We sat down with Gavin Slevin, important person at Dell who handles Alienware in South Africa, to get more insight into how the pricing on the Alienware gaming laptops really works.

Gavin told us that there were many factors one needed to take into account before we could compare the pricing between Alienware products in the U.S. and S.A.

The first is VAT, which in America is quite complicated. Each American state has its own tax structure, so the amount of tax applicable to a machine built on the Alienware website will vary. In California for example, sales tax (equivalent to our Value added tax VAT) is 7.25 percent of the value of the laptop purchased.

The other thing to bear in mind is that local Alienware products come with either a 3 or 4 year warranty, whereas the default configuration on the U.S. Alienware ships with just a single year warranty. Upgrading to a three year warranty will set you back a cool $300 (R2440.18).

Alienware M14X

Slevin said that Dell try to get products into the country as soon as possible after they’ve been made available to the public. The only issue that Dell faces with keeping up to date Alienware products in the country is current stock in the channel.

This is stock that has previously been imported and needs to sell before Dell can import new stock. While this may be unrelated to moving stock in the channel, the Alienware M14X laptop was recently discounted by R3,000, possibly in an attempt to move older stock.

Pricing between a locally available Alienware M17X R3 and a similar specification machine from Dell online store appears in the table below. Exact specifications were not available as the old stock is no longer available from the Dell site.

However we built the U.S. machine to resemble the locally available one as close as possible.

As you can see from table, the specifications are for the most part identical. The only noteworthy differences are the graphics card and CPU. However these are in the same series of components and costs should be relatively comparable.

The total cost of $3,376.23 (R27,461.97) includes Californian sales tax, making it comparable to the local retail price of R29,999.95.

Our local price is within the 10% of U.S. pricing (9.24 percent), as Slevin said it would be.

Alienware M17x

Below we have another configuration of an Alienware M17X R3, also locally available. The only noteworthy difference in specs this time is the CPU, otherwise most other components are comparable.

The total cost of the U.S. based machine with Californian sales tax included comes to $2,539.68 (R20 905.12), which is higher than the local price of the same machine, which sells for R19,999.95.

Relative to the U.S. price, local Alienware stock fares quite well. However there is one scenario where the 10 percent rule doesn’t apply, in the case of custom built machines.

Slevin explained that since no local stock of custom built machines is kept, Dell have to special order the custom machine from the U.S., which obviously leads to a price premium.

Once the new range of Alienware laptops is in the country, MyGaming will do a second comparison with like-for-like specifications; but from all accounts the pricing is set to remain favourable to South Africa consumers.

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