Storage market in India currently witnessing tremendous growth as mobility has become latest trend for consumers. We see lots of potential for storage players in India to gain reasonable market share.ADATA Technology, one of the world’s largest vendors of DRAM Modules and USB Flash Drives also focuses on the same. Richard Tan, Managing Director, ADATA Technology India reveals his plans and marketing strategies with DIGITAL TERMINAL. Below are the excerpts.
DT: How do you see current external storage market in India? What are the key challenges for this market?
Richard:The current external storage market in India is poised well and looking forward to a growth oriented scenario in the coming months. With the advent of smart mobile phones and other computing devise – users are always looking forward for additional space. Today a user normally carries a minimum of 2 to 3 devices that stores his or her data. Some markets figures available with us shows that the most fast moving product right now are the external HDDs and that too in a minimum of 1TB and above. The challenges that this segment faces is of many unorganized segment players bringing in inferior quality products, supply of materials through gray channels, etc.
DT: What are your efforts to capitalizethis growth trend in ADATA’s favour?
Richard:ADATA through its distributors and channel partners have laid a growth path for partners wherein we have been successfully running loyalty partner program for last couple of quarters, then we have also run an incentive program on SSDs for corporate resellers and their employees to gain confidence on ADATA SSDs. We have increased our marketing activities and have been consistently helping out channel partners.
DT: Where do you position ADATA product in this very competitive Indian market?
Richard:In terms of product quality we are confident of being the best amongst the best. Our core strength lies in research and developing new products for the global markets. As most of our products are flash based which is a very price sensitive raw material, we make sure to be well placed in terms of product availability so that partners have the confidence that in times of prices going up and down we are there to support them. Talking in terms of India business, we are well placed with our distribution and channel partners network along with our sales and marketing team to back them up.
DT: Brief us about your current distribution model in India.
Richard:ADATA India has a multi-dimensional distribution model in India. For DRAMs, we have Rashi Peripherals and Compuage Infocom as our national distributors. For other products apart from DRAM, we have neoteric as our national distributor. Then we have 4 regional distributors, Creative Peripherals in West, Inspan in South, Fortune in North and Technocrat Infotech focusing in North and East region as one of our longest standing partners in India.
DT: What are your plans to boost channel strength in coming months?
Richard:We have constantly been working with our channel partners and distributors to come out with innovative schemes and marketing projects to create awareness and increase sales. With the onset of festive season, and online business growing penetration we have tied up with many a leading ecommerce portals to increase our foot print on the ecommerce business as well.
DT: What are your expectations from the OND quarter which brings festive season fever?
Richard:As mentioned earlier, we are upbeat about the last quarter of 2014 and plan to increase our growth over the last quarter by at least 25%.
DT: What all margin and profitability you share with your partners?
Richard:This entirely depends upon the international price changes – but we see to and make sure that our partners get healthy growth.
DT: How you are managing better service support?
Richard:Apart from F1 Services for entire range of ADATA products we have table top replacement for DRAM through Rashi and Compuage as they are our distributors and help us expedite the process.
