The man behind the $37.99 tablet wants to sell one for $19.99 within two years

December 20, 2013 Leave a comment

The man behind the $37.99 tablet wants to sell one for $19.99 within two years

By Matt McFarland, Updated: December 16 at 8:24 am

Datawind began selling three of its 7-inch devices in the United States on Monday. The least expensive model, the UbiSlate 7Ci, a 7-inch, Android-powered tablet, will sell for $37.99.The tablets can’t match the technical specifications of the latest Apple or Samsung tablets but are designed for a price-sensitive consumer who may have been priced out of the tablet market in the past.

“My customer says, ‘I want something that’s good enough and functional enough and gives me a good experience; I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for it,’ ” Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli said.

He calls it the innovation of good enough.

While Internet access is as common as oxygen for many of us, roughly a fifth of Americans don’t have online access. Price can be a sticking point for the less affluent, and that’s where Datawind is at its best. The company views bridging the digital divide as a social good worth contributing to. The tablets aren’t selling at a loss, but margins are intentionally kept thin.

“In the Indian market, we could’ve gotten away with prices 30 percent higher, could’ve done the same in the United States. Would we sell any less at $49.99? Maybe not? But to break that price barrier and drive it down is very important,” Tuli said.

While the $37.99 price tag for the UbiSlate 7Ci seems low, Tuli isn’t done yet.

“Where do I see this in a year or two? I think it’s $19.99. I think you’ll be able to get a reasonable 7-inch tablet for sub-20 where the guy selling will make a couple bucks,” Tuli said.

The mid-priced model, the UbiSlate 7C+, is $79.99, and for $99.99 it comes with a year of data that is processed through a Datawind proxy server. The average page loads in three to five seconds. It won’t excel at streaming videos but is made for text-heavy pages such as Wikipedia. The most-expensive version, the UbiSlate 3G7 is $129.99, and $149.99 with a year of data. Both devices are phablets and come with a SIM chip for a year, giving a user the option to add a plan to make phone calls.

Datawind also makes money off the devices through ads that appear in the Web browser, plus sales in its app and eBook stores. The devices, manufactured in China and India, can currently only be purchased at ubislate.us.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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