LG Electronics India announced a marginal price hike in CRT monitors owing to the constant escalation of input costs, effective from 16th June'06 onwards. The price hike in CRT monitors segment will be approximately of 2percent.

Commenting on the hike R Manikandan, GM-Sales and Marketing, IT Products, LGEIL stated, "The US dollar rate is on a rise which has resulted in additional costs on imported raw materials for CRT monitors. Also prices of raw material have increased sharply especially copper. Thus, given the current market scenario, price hike for CRT monitors was inevitable. We have tried to minimize the effect on consumers by absorbing these rising input costs over the years but the trend is on a constant rise and we have reached at a level where absorbing the entire cost internally seems to be a tough proposition"

Copper and plastics are some of the critical inputs of CRT PC monitors and all these raw materials have registered an average price hike of 20 percent to 25 percent. Steel and copper prices alone have seen a price rise of 25 percent and 100 percent respectively as compared to Jan'06. Aluminum and crude oil prices have gone up by 40 percent and 20percent respectively, resulting in an escalation of 20 percent in the cost of various engineering, plastics and energy.

Although the net impact of exchange rate and raw material cost increase is very high, LG claims that it is still absorbing a major portion of the same and passing on only a minimum price increase so that the overall impact on the PC pricing is low. Moving ahead, there will be a gradual price increase on CRT Monitors although slowly but steadily till end of August 2006.

Page(s)   1