Distributers In Pakistan Go Bonkers: Asking Scalped Prices For 4-Year Old Refurbished GPUs, ASUS Sets Insane MSRPs For South Asian Market

Earlier this year, we published a story about how the majority of distributors within the South Asian and Middle Eastern markets don’t play well with customers and most of the time, even with top tier brands and partners of NVIDIA, AMD, & Intel. The GPU situation is something that has affected the global market but in the case of South Asian countries such as Pakistan, things are made worse by official distributors and retailers.

ASUS’s Primary Distributor For Pakistan Market Sets Insane MSRPs on GPUs, Other Official Distributors Selling 4-Year Old Refurbished GPUs at Scaled Prices

We are aware the prices are bad in every region but there are some things in which South Asian & Middle Eastern stand out. It’s not just retailers that are using scalping practices but so are official distributors and sometimes even AIBs who allow such tactics to be used in the first place and don’t block supply to these retailers even after they continue to make huge profits out of customers. It was also seen that the same distributors broke the NDA by selling unreleased GPUs weeks prior to launch through back-channel dealings. They first set insane prices then released the list prices of these GPUs to their top-tier customers who had demanded either single or bulk units of the said cards.

We are now sitting at the tail end of 2021 and it looks like the same distributors have come up with more innovative tactics to scam consumers. The following lists are shared by our sources who got them from certain distributors within the Pakistan market.

First up, we have AU Technologies who is a fairly large distributor and primarily deals within Palit and Sapphire graphics cards. We wanted to show this price list first mainly because of the fact that they are selling 4-5-year-old graphics cards that have no warranty and asking scalped prices for them. The cards include the likes of RX 480, RTX 570, RTX 590, RX 5600 XT, and RX Vega 64. The distributor openly shares the mining performance of these cards within the list which means that these are aimed at miners and it is said that the cards are ready for stock. The distributor is asking for 100% cash payments and it looks like even the boxes won’t be the official ones used by either Sapphire or Palit.

When it comes to prices, the RX 480 is listed for 100,000 PKR which converts to $585 US. Yes, that’s $585 US for a refurbished card with no warranty. Their special retailer partners will get a small price discount of 5000 PKR or $30 US. But do remember, this is the price being set by the official distributors and retailers further want their share of profit too so the price is likely going to end up around 150,000 PKR over $800 US. You can see the rest of the prices below:

Moving forward, we have ASUS who has provided its official distributor, Pacific Computers for Pakistan, a price list for their latest graphics cards. The list mostly includes NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. Our attention was caught by the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which is priced at 145,000 PKR or $850 US. The good part is that these cards will come with an official ASUS warranty and will be brand new but that’s the only good thing. $850 US is more than the MSRP of the RTX 3080 and once again, this is the Ex-distributor price. Once these enter the retail segment, we are once again going to see the 2nd round of price hikes being applied for shopkeepers to earn their own profits by scamming customers while hiding behind blatant lies and excuses of custom duties and others they mask their prices around.

The price list from Pacific Computers can be seen below and once again, remember that these are not final retail prices. Those will be even higher:

The other thing is that these prices won’t just come down even if the GPU market starts showing signs of recovery, the Pakistani prices are going to remain intact and will only go up considering the rising inflation and the ever-dropping value of the PKR compared to USD. Plus distributors and retailers can use the same guise by saying that they bought the GPUs at higher prices so they’ve got to recover their losses somehow which is complete BS considering they hold on to big stock supply for months and sell them at huge profits. We have information of various other retailers and distributors who follow these tactics along with their respective price lists but we will share them in a more detailed article in the future!

The post Distributers In Pakistan Go Bonkers: Asking Scalped Prices For 4-Year Old Refurbished GPUs, ASUS Sets Insane MSRPs For South Asian Market by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.