The Brazilian Tablet Fever
Tablets are being adopted in Brazil in many different sectors. This article will give you an idea about this new fever and will also help you understand how the tablet market works in the country.
Tablets and the Brazilian market
Tablets first arrived in Brazil in 2010, through Apple's iPad, but were not unknown by the population - many people have bought the competitor's version abroad or even illegally.
It is estimated that if added the legal and the illegal market, plus the products acquired abroad, during its first year in Brazil, tablets' sales achieved 100 thousand unities. We cannot forget that it was just the beginning, when there were only two companies competing in the market: Apple and Samsung. Nowadays, there are more than seven.
There are no numbers about tablets sales in 2011 yet, but in the beginning of last year, the expectation was that sales would achieve more than 400 thousand units but this number is not confirmed yet. According to the government, since last September tablets are being manufactured in Brazil. There are five different companies working with them already.
Nowadays, there are good news about the Brazilian market for tablets. Brazilian companies started to produce their own tablets with contents focused on local population, including softwares completely translated to Portuguese. But prices are still not competitive. People would rather buy a imported tablet with high quality, instead of buying the national product for the same price.
Tablets and taxes
In order to stimulate tablet manufacturing in the country, by the end of 2011, Brazilian Federal Government approved measures to reduce the taxes paid by tablet manufacturers in Brazil. Such reduction will directly affect the final price of the portable computers, cutting prices in 36%.
Those measures exempted tablet industries from paying PIS and Cofins and also allowed states to choose between reducing or not the ICMS. In São Paulo, for example, the ICMS is only 7%, but it can be less than that in other states.
Tablets and Brazilian Education
The Brazilian public educational system has reached another level with the insertion of tablets in the teaching method. According to MEC (Brazilian ministry of education), in 2012, the government will spend BRL 150 millions on tablets, as an attempt to insert the in the Brazilian public highschools.
According to Aloisio Mercadante, the minister of education, 600 thousand tablets produced by POSITIVO and DIGIBRAS will be sent to more than 620 schools in the country. The distribution will start in July and is expected to be finished in December.
There are also changes on the private educational system. Nowadays, universities realized that giving tablets to students optimize the information flux and reduce logistic costs. According to some universities that introduced tablets in their educational method, it is cheaper to provide a tablet to each of their students than printing all the material given in the classroom.
An important point to analyze about the government's project is that the last digital inclusion initiative focused on the modernization of the public educational system has failed. UCA, short for “Um Computador por Aluno” (A computer per student) has failed, being limited to 2% of the national public schools. Is the new tablet project going to run better than the computer one? We hope so, but the government has an important image to change.
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- The Brazilian Educational System
- Understanding ICMS
- The 16 Most Common Brazilian Taxes
- Why are the taxes in Brazil so high?
- Parallel Imports in Brazil