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The most and least expensive countries to buy gadgets

Most and least expensive country by popular gadget types

Where would you get the best price for that gadget on your list? Using this dataset containing cost of popular electronic devices and brands across 72 countries in 2016–2017, I explored the most and least expensive countries to buy a specific gadget.

gadget price by country and continent (excluding Venezuela)
gadget price by country and continent (excluding Venezuela)

We can make many observations, including but not limited to:

  • Angola is a good place to buy an iphone but not android product, PS4 or smart TV
  • Bangladesh offers good deals in hard drives
  • While in Hungary, also get a PS4
  • It might be better to get Apple watch from Russia than Philippines

When I first looked at the data, Venezuela prices look completely insane (an iphone could could $100,000) and I initially thought there’s something wrong, until I read this Times article and realised that inflation had blown its price out of proportion.

If including the outlier of Venezuela gadget prices, the chart looks like this:

New way to flout your wealth is to buy a gadget in Venezuela
New way to flout your wealth is to buy a gadget in Venezuela

After viewing by countries, we can explore the regional level prices.

Gadget price benchmark by region
Gadget price benchmark by region

At regional level, we can observe:

  • Oceania has lower price for Xbox one and Apple Watch
  • Almost all Africa countries have above median price for Apple product and gaming gadgets
  • Branded headphones are a bit pricey in Asia whereas Macbook has lower price in majority of the countries.

Instead of comparing with global benchmark, we can also compare against local purchasing power which takes into account wage factors. This is more telling of gadgets being over-priced in a country for the local consumers.

Gadget price is relatively high in several South America and Southeast Asian countries considering purchasing powers
Gadget price is relatively high in several South America and Southeast Asian countries considering purchasing powers

This is #day25 of my #100dayprojects on Data Science and visual storytelling. Full code on my github. Thanks for reading and feedbacks are welcomed.


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