Thank you for the iRobot article. I enjoyed it.

Some electronic items are expensive in Korea because of luxury tax(50-100%). The Roomba, together with foreign golf clubs and foreign cars, is under the tax.

with the penetration rate so high and the price reasonable it only makes sense to make these things yourself inside the country.

But the price is not reasonable, it’s practically double the USD price. I would like an Irobot vacuum myself, but the extremely large markup, even considering localization, voltage adjustments, and additional freight expenses, is vexatious.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.....e/1435.cfm

surprisingly, irobot has sold more house cleaning robots than i had imagined and their penetration rate in the ROK is surprising as well.

In the lower-income countries, I’m not sure we see a near-term market opportunity because there are other low cost solutions. However, a country like Japan started out doing manufacturing and now it’s a high-income country. Korea is following suit. And I would imagine China will be following suit in the short timeframe. Countries progress. They start out taking on the low-cost jobs and then move up. India’s doing a lot of software development for the United States now. Just because it’s a low-income country today doesn’t mean it won’t be a target for robot sales in the future.

Korea has been a great market for us. We have almost as deep penetration in Korea as we have in the United States for the Roomba.

as far as the costs of such machines,

Our goal at iRobot is to build practical and affordable robot systems. We are not there to do demonstrations of technology. We are not there to talk about stuff that’s going to happen 50 years from now in robots — although that’s going to be extremely exciting. We really concentrate on practical and affordable systems for today.

For example, we have 1.5 million Roombas helping people clean their homes everyday. You push a button, it comes out and does the sweeping and vacuuming. When you get back [home], it’s on its charging station charging itself. Our Roombas run between $150 and $330 — practical and affordable.

with the penetration rate so high and the price reasonable it only makes sense to make these things yourself inside the country. i assume there’s a whole bunch of reverse engineering going on with cleaning robots. the other examples of robots in the article are all engineering feats accomplished. the one fly in the ointment, which i think baduk brought up, is speech. perhaps with the devotion to language in korea some serious work can be done on this. god knows microsoft has had a dedicated department for this for years and has progressed but gotten nowhere near their ambitions 15 years ago.

Regarding robotics in Korea, the only time I’ve ever seen consumer robots here was in the housewares section of a department store showing the American Irobot vacuum cleaners sold at a hefty 100% -150% markup over the U.S. price (I still can’t figure out if the gross price differentials on imported products originate from foreign suppliers pricing their products as “luxury goods,” Korean importers doing the same, or high tarrifs). I have never seen domestic robot vacuum cleaners being sold at brick and mortar retailers anywhere in Korea, and even on the Internet these also seem overpriced and rare so if they’re selling well here it’s news to me.

One of the stranger bits of Internet bitching/rumor-mongering I have come across is all the people who try to discredit Nori by calling him “zainichi”. Like that (regarless of its accuracy) has anything to do with his stories. It’s like the Japanese equivalent of the John Birch Society.