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COMPAQ Computer will cut prices on its popular Presario range of personal computers by about 20 per cent this week.

  Details are to be announced on Thursday.

  Last week, Compaq reduced prices of some commercial and consumer PCs by up to 13 per cent in a bid to lift sales in the second half of the year.

  After those cuts, a 75 MHz Pentium Compaq ProLinea with 8MB RAM, 256 KB cache and a 420MB hard drive costs about US$1,799.

  Meanwhile, IBM also announced price cuts for commercial PCs last week.

   Prices of some models in the IBM PC 300 and 700 series will come down by between nine per cent and 26 per cent in the US, but the Hong Kong operation has no immediate plans to follow suit.

   Other computer companies say they will not be lowering prices.

  Packard Bell cut prices by about 10 per cent recently and has no plans for another round of reductions, according to a spokesman in Hong Kong.

  A Packard Bell Pentium model PB570 with 75 MHz Pentium, 8MB RAM and 540MB hard drive costs about $14,698 in Hong Kong following the cuts.

  Acer in Hong Kong also said it had no immediate plans to cut prices.

  At the same time as it announced the cuts, Compaq said two new high performance Pentium 133 MHz models - the ProLinea 5133 - would be available next month.

   These would feature 16MB of memory and up to 2GB hard drives, and retail for about US$3,379.

  The price cuts come ahead of a what could be a spectacular Christmas selling season as consumers load up on new machines capable of handling Windows 95.

  Compaq - the world's top-selling PC maker last year according to market research firm Dataquest - expects rival PC makers to cut prices to increase market share, said Bruno Didier, head of Compaq's European marketing operations.

  'We expect our competitors to follow suit and cut prices,' he said. 'We want to be first.'      Meanwhile, IBM said a PC 700 with a 120 megahertz Pentium processor, 1 gigabyte hard drive and 16 megabytes of memory will be reduced 26 per cent to $3,070.

    An IBM PC 330 with a 100 MHz Pentium chip, 540 megabyte hard drive and 8 megabytes of memory was reduced 24 per cent to $1,909.



Compaq cuts prices