“India Is One of The Most Important Markets For Kingston In APAC”
The Indian storage market has witnessed tremendous growth over the years and the growing demand for high performance storage products taking this market to several notches up. Market players like Kingston Technology which have been serving the market for a long time have witnessed the transformation of this market very closely. To know more about this industry landscape, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently interacted with Tejashwar Singh, India Sales Head, Kingston Technology. Mr. Tejashwar shared details about the Indian storage market, their endeavors for boosting sales, FURY brand, upcoming product launches and etc. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: What is your core strength as a leader in the Indian storage market? How was your performance in CY 2021?
Tejashwar: India is one of the most important markets for Kingston in APAC. It has immense potential in PCDIY as well as gaming space. With pandemic changing the trends of how people are consuming data, the memory as well as storage segment has grown phenomenally.
As a leader in the Indian storage solutions market, we have enhanced our position especially during the last two years of the pandemic. While the market dynamics were muted, we at Kingston Technology had rung in a number of changes to ensure that we stay on top of the curve. Our product launches as well as marketing campaigns were hence more connected to our consumers with tailored messaging around their interests as well as events and issues they care about. For instance, we launched our Kingston FURY for the gaming lovers, and henceforth tapped the gaming influencers, as well as the gaming enthusiasts for our coming marketing campaigns including the FURY Filter challenge. Moreover, our upcoming campaign of ‘Kingston Is With You’ 2.0- we have emphasized on how our Kingston products are an intrinsic part of a customer’s journey, and our customer’s success resonates to our success.
Performance wise as well we have reinforced our leadership position in the storage segment yet again. Market share data from analyst research company TRENDFOCUS showed Kingston as the number one client SSD vendor in the channel with 22.2% for unit market share and 22.3 million client SSDs shipped for all of 2021 in the channel. In October, we broadened our portfolio by launching two new high performance client M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, KC3000 and Kingston FURY Renegade for content creators, high-performance users, and gamers. Hence, in Q4 alone, Kingston’s client SSD market share grew to a substantial 26.8% in the channel which displays a healthy annual unit growth despite ongoing component shortages
Going ahead as well, our aim is to strive for and maintain a leadership position in the category and meet our customers' demands.
Rajeev: You all launched Kingston FURY Gaming Lab back in April. What is the main purpose for the Kingston FURY Gaming Lab? What is the reason behind establishing the Kingston FURY Gaming Lab in Hsinchu, Taiwan?
Tejashwar: Through our gaming lab space, we look forward to gamers, overclockers and partners participating in the fine-tuning and optimization of Kingston FURY products to help us emphasize the evolving needs of our customers and the gaming market.
From engineering processes to product testing and quality control, Kingston’s R&D center at the Hsinchu Science Park has been the backbone of countless innovative projects, making it the perfect location for the Kingston FURY Gaming Lab.
Rajeev: Are you planning to launch Kingston FURY Gaming Lab in India?
Tejashwar: Our world’s first Kingston FURY Gaming Lab in Hsinchu will act as the hub for integrating innovation, product solutions and real-life applications in gaming. We will continue to invest our resources in getting gamers, industry players, and partners together in helping us fine-tuning and optimization of Kingston FURY products and in providing us with constructive feedback for us to understand the needs of gamers even better.
Going forward, this Kingston FURY Gaming Lab will act as the center of sharing knowledge across all the important markets of Kingston. We are still internally discussing the feasibility of coming up with our Kingston FURY Gaming Lab in India as well as other markets. We will share our future plans with you once we have anything concrete.
Rajeev: What is your current product launch plan for India?
Tejashwar: We have a compelling product launch road map for the upcoming months to cater to discerning customers across categories. From gamers to photographers to enterprise customers, we are launching plethora of products to cater to their tailor-made needs.
For the mainstream gaming enthusiasts, we are soon launching Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 RGB DRAM. Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 RGB RAM is the latest addition of Kingston Technology in the wide range of Memory modules. Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 RGB is for overclockers, professional gamers and media professionals. The new Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 comes with enhanced lighting as well as new heat spreader design for brighter and smoother RGB illumination. Now gamers can play in style by customizing the smooth, stunning range of RGB lighting effects using Kingston FURY CTRL or the motherboard manufacturer’s software. It also boasts of our patented Kingston FURY Infrared Sync Technology™ to provide vibrant RGB effects light in unison. In May 2022, we launched Kingston FURY Impact DDR5 DRAM for all the notebook users who love gaming. Later this year, we are also planning to launch Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 RGB DRAM for the extreme gamers.
For the enterprise level customers as well as content creators looking for data security, we will be launching Kingston IronKey™ Vault Privacy 50 series and IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD (VP80ES), our newest additions to the encrypted lineup. Kingston IronKey™ Vault Privacy 50 series are premium USB drives that provide business-grade security with FIPS 197 certified AES 256-bit hardware-encryption in XTS mode.
For the mainstream users, who want to carry their important memories and document on the go, we are launching two new USBs- Kingston DataTraveler® microDuo™ 3C and Kingston DataTraveler® Micro USB Flash Drive.
Lastly, we are coming up with a 4TB version of our Kingston XS2000 external SSD for content creators and photographers.
Rajeev: How do you assure excellent service support to your loyal customers? Please brief about any investment plan to enhance the service infrastructure across all regions.
Tejashwar: Being world leader in memory products and storage solutions, we have constantly been at the top of the curve in connecting with our customers pan India using various digital tools and platforms. To stay ahead of the curve, we have been carefully studying the rapidly changing scenario of operating effectively in a diverse market and have set new benchmarks in the quality of service, ensuring turnaround times not exceeding 48 hours to address any kind of customer feedback (on areas like quality and service). Even in a condition where the customer cannot visit the Service Centre physically, there has been a constant endeavor to upgrade service standards based on feedback received from customers, and we try to address the service requests remotely. Moreover, we also have courier facility as well for such customers.
Traditionally we have focused on delighting the customer based with proactive communication, speedy response. We have continued to significantly scale-up the service infrastructure by looking at both Pre-sales and Post-sales. Pre-sales would include product compatibility check assistance and answering questions about product specification and general usage, through calls, email, e-tail sites, customer Q&A and all social media platforms. There would assistance provided to purchase genuine products through registered and authentic sources. Post-sales would include product verification and warranty confirmation assistance, with free technical support for installation. The transition to SSDs from the old drives is also made easy now with the free Acronis tool that is used for cloning the old data onto the new SSD with assistance right through the entire process. The increased acceptance of Kingston Technology SSDs’ is also driven by the SSD Health Monitor tool within the Kingston SSD Manager, complimented by the presence of over 46 service centres where the customer outreach has been proactive for walk-in customers. Kingston Technology also guarantees over 80% replacement on the spot for genuine complaints and even an upgradation to a higher model in the case of unavailability of stock.
Rajeev: What role channel partners play in your strategy and how do you motivate your channel partners?
Tejashwar: We strongly believe in channel friendly approach and mutually growing with the channel partners. We believe that for us to grow, our partners need to grow with us, henceforth we always try to provide our partners with compelling business opportunities. Adding to this, our compelling products and market expertise provide a platform for the channel partners to improve and grow in terms of revenue and reach. On an ongoing basis there are customized training sessions for the channel partners to educate them about new products and share useful first-hand information about the industry trends. Recently, to reward our partners for their dedication, diligence and stellar performance, we felicitated over 48 channel partners for their stellar performance and support to grow the brand in leaps and bounds in 2021. Over the years, the channel partners have been one of our biggest growth drivers for Kingston Technology, and the initiative is another step towards giving an impetus to the engagement with the partners. It is a win-win partnership, and going ahead as well, we will be coming up with exciting initiatives to keep our channel partners motivated.
