Radioddity Sale 11/27/20

[kd2lh]

Radioddity (US marketing) has announced a sale for 11/27/20.

The GD77 is being offered with a spare battery for $70. Only 30 units are available at that price.

The entire site is 20% off during the sale.

I have no financial involvement with Radioddity, but thought members here might find this useful. I make no recommendations, but have had good experiences buying from them, especially when the product was already in the USA.

[VK3KYY]

I've noticed recently that Radioddity have not always been including the GD-77 in their sales. I suspect this may be because they are already selling quite a lot of GD-77 and don't feel the need to reduce the price.

So this would be a sign that sales had tailed off a bit.

I know Radioddity don't make much money on the GD-77, as they buy the radio from TYT.
They just load their own variant of the official TYT MD-760 firmware and slap on a Radioddity sticker on the front of the radio.

But AFIK, outside China, its hard to get hold of the MD-760, and even if you do manage to find a vendor on AliExpress selling the MD-760, its often more expensive than buying a GD-77 from Radioddity

[VK3KYY]

However, probably due to overstock or some other reasons, the Retevis RT3s (same as TYT MD-UV380) was deeply discounted on eBay for quite a while, and from their Official Store too, to about $65. w/o GPSr, and $70. w/ GPSr. I bought my first one at $95. USD (w/o GPSr), but that one went to a friend, so I bought a 2nd one when I saw the deeply discounted price on eBay. Then later on, the price creeped back up a bit, interestingly. I suspect that had to do with the overstocking plus the release of a newer model at the time, that they worry people won't want to buy the older model anymore.

The RT3S and most "Retevis" branded radios have been significantly cheaper than the original TYT branded radios, for some time..

Its difficult to know why they are cheaper, considering they are just the TYT radios with a different sticker on the front.
I bought a RT3S and took it apart, and its definitely a TYT MD-UV380 if you look at the PCB etc.

Whether the price difference is because of overstocking is unclear, because the Retevis branded radios have been cheap for 6 months or more.


In terms or margins on these radios, depends on the production margins verses the reseller margins.
The manufacturer e.g. TYT or Baofeng can definitely make a profit on these radios, but China is such an opaque market, with many companies intimately owned and possibly subsidised by the Chinese government, its impossible to know the true price of these radios.

For a long time the Chinese vendors seemed to be able to get free shipping on all their products, but that seems to have come to an end over the last year, so it may be that gradually the other subsidies for the raw product may be reduced.