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The shortage of low-cost regular usage laptops continues to plague the Indian market. The surge in the demand for laptops continues as a result of the new work culture of almost every school child and office worker needing a laptop. The laptop companies are not able to manufacture enough laptops to meet the demand. Further, to complicate matters, the laptop exporting ability of China remains low as a result of its foolhardy geopolitical policies, which have jeopardised the laptop industry.
The MNCs manufacturing laptops insist upon basing their manufacturing activity in China, which shows their priority for profits above the convenience of customers.
To complicate things further, there is a chip shortage in China, which is further hampering the manufacture of the electronics.
"The PC industry continues to be hampered by supply and logistical challenges and unfortunately these issues have not seen much improvement in recent months," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC's Mobile and Consumer Device Trackers. "Given the current circumstances, we are seeing some vendors reprioritise shipments amongst various markets, allowing emerging markets to maintain growth momentum while some mature markets begin to slow."
The laptop resellers have been complaining for long that they are running short of PCs. Now some of them are completely out of stock.
They often blame the E-commerce platforms, but a quick search on the E-commerce platform shows a severe shortage of low-cost regular usage laptops. Gone are the days when the customers had ample choice of low-cost attractive laptops online.
Amazon is mostly selling renewed i.e., refurbished low-cost laptops, while Flipkart has a small variety of low-cost models available, most of them having low-grade processors, which are likely to get spoilt in a short time. There are hardly one or two models on Flipkart which have a high grade processor in the low-cost category. This is in sharp contrast to the very positive online laptop market till two years ago.
This is the moment to reckon the complexity of situations and begin thinking of a new business model, in line with the evolving markets, rather than trying to enforce the old business ideas against everybody's convenience.