iPad price-war brewing in the UAE

Don’t look- but it seems that an iPad price war has been brewing between a few UAE based online resellers. Since the launch of iPad in the US, there has been tremendous interest from the local market to acquire these devices that will probably not be available officially for at least a good three months.

The first devices that arrived here obviously fetched the top Dirham with bandits getting away by charging AED 4,500 for a 16GB unit that sells for US$500 or AED 1835. Add 10% tax, 4% duty and shipping charges and you are probably looking at a cost price of 2,200 Dirhams. That means that the initial ones sold locally made a profit of 2300 Dirhams or over 100%. That probably triple of what Apple is making on these devices!

Once the initial wave of bandits finished off their deals, prices obviously started lowering. While Al-Shop is still charging the insane price of AED 4,500 with a banner highlighting “best price”, the slightly less greedy bunch of resellers at souq.com are asking about 3,000 Dirhams for it. If you shop around a bit more, you’ll see that nahel.com is charging a better price of 2,799. To match that, I got a tweet saying emiratesavenue.com has them on sale for 2,690 which is a lot more reasonable price to pay for something that costs 2,200 on the higher side.

I expect prices to fall slightly more as demand decreases. If I were to guess, I’d say that AED 2,500 would be the price its settled at with the one-off deal or desperate seller unloading it for a few bucks less. I don’t really know what the official price would be when its released in the UAE but I’d say that it would be right around that.

So- have you gotten your iPad yet? Would be awesome if you can comment with the price you paid for it and the place you picked it up from.