> I do not think that the poster of DPReview (or more precisely the > retailer) asked the right channel to get this information. > > In Japan, it's accepted that the overwhelming orders was the reason for > the delay. > > ----- > > Okay, I have a lot of faith in Ken. He is careful and has good sources. > I'll accept that Pentax's explanation is not a fabrication. > > But I still don't understand why a company would warehouse merchandise > that people want to buy.
The reason is simple: the Gray Market. Many unscrupulous mail order and internet retailers buy their merchandise from countries outside the one they're located in, usually allowing them to get better pricing due to exchange rates, taxes, and other costs. They then sell these items to unsuspecting customers well below the price the merchandise normally sells for in their country (some of the worst retailers even sell the item stripped of what would normally come in the box). This hurts sales and profits for both Pentax and upstanding Pentax retailers, and is often illegal. One problem is that most of these "gray market" items come with warranties that won't be honored anywhere except where the item was supposed to be sold. This means a broken item must be sent back to its intended market to recieve warranty service. Gray market items are often also sold without manuals in the language of the country they're being sold in. At Reed's, I dealt with this situation from time to time, where someone would come in with a camera they bought off the internet, and when we sent it into the camera company's US repair center, it was rejected because it was gray market (regardless of whether or not the warranty was still in effect). These companies are just trying to protect their bottom line by enforcing specific regions where cameras are meant to end up. In other words: New, high-demand merchandise such as the K10D need to be released simultaneously in as many markets as possible to prevent unscrupulous retailers selling (often illegally) to other markets and causing problems for everyone. Does that make sense? I'm not sure I rambled enough to make myself clear. ;-) John Celio P.S.: a similar situation is worldwide releases of movies. often, when a highly-anticipated movie is released in one country before most of the rest of the world, pirated copies of the movie end up in those other regions within days or weeks. People in those countries buy the pirated copies instead of seeing the movie in the theaters, regardless of how poor the quality of the pirated copy is, and often sell those DVDs to unscrupulous or unsuspecting buyers around the world. This sort of piracy is rampant in China and other parts of asia, where pirated American movies end up on DVDs for sale there shortly after the movies are released in the US. Worldwide simultaneous releases of films helps to solve this problem, though it can delay the release of the movie while the various translations and/or subtitles are prepared. Granted, this is somewhat different from selling gray market cameras, but the loss of sales and profits is the same. -- http://www.neovenator.com AIM: Neopifex "Hey, I'm an artist. I can do whatever I want and pretend I'm making a statement." -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
