No entrance fees, HK$1 bargains, free cold drinks - it didn't take much to pack thousands of people into four Sham Shui Po computer malls yesterday to seek cheap deals at a week-long festival sale competing directly with a similar event which begins in Wan Chai on Friday.
The Golden Computer Arcade, Golden Computer Centre, Golden Computer Plaza new wing and New Capital Computer Centre kicked off their monster summer computer festival on a HK$1 million budget - with retail prices similar to or below cost - in a bid to bring in the punters before the Hong Kong Computer and Communications Festival starts on Friday.
It worked. Golden Computer Centre, which recently experienced its lowest vendor occupancy rate in its history, was so packed with thousands of bargain hunters that shoppers could hardly move. Visitor numbers tripled from normal days, vendors said. Sales at CompuMark System Trading, a shop offering monitors and TV sets, exceeded HK$100,000 in three hours, or four times more than on a normal day, proprietor Sam Ho said. 'The overlapping of the two festivals is good because it attracts people's attention,' he said. The shop would also participate in the Wan Chai event.
More than 300 bargains are offered daily at the Sham Shui Po fair. Yesterday, 20 sets of Philips speakers, priced at HK$29, one tenth of their retail price, sold out in 10 minutes. Sixty Phillips headphones and computer mice at HK$1 each went out the door in about the same time, and 60-gigabyte netbooks, each at HK$1,899 or HK$200 below cost, also sold out. There are more bargains today, among them 15 AOC 42-inch LCD TV sets at HK$3,999 and 60 Viewsonic 19-inch monitors at HK$599.
Although the products are cheap, they come at a price: the first shoppers arrived to queue outside the Golden Computer Centre at 5am yesterday, and all 300 tokens which enable one to buy one of the limited-offer items, were gone by 8.30am.
Tsang Yick-chui, 48, started queueing with his wife and son at 7am to buy two BenQ 19-inch monitors and a netbook for HK$2,998. 'The monitor at home didn't break down,' he said. 'But it's so cheap I want to get an additional one.'
Alex Lee, a 19-year-old student, said he planned to buy a HK$299 external hard disk and would also attend the Wan Chai fair.
Deals, deals, deals
More than 300 bargains are offered daily at the Sham Shui Po computer fair
Sixty-gigabyte netbooks were sold in double quick time for HK$200less than cost at, in HK dollars: $1,899
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