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Demand for Laptops Rising in Corona Virus Outbreak Times

Demand for Laptops Rising in Corona Virus Outbreak Times to show the need for laptops and desktops when work from home is rising

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Archana Verma
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With the organisations given the directive to make their employees work from home, laptops have become an essential commodity, with collaborative technologies rising in demand. How are the suppliers coping with the rising demand?

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With the outbreak of Coronavirus in India, the government decided to go for a complete lockdown and directed the employers to make their employees work from home. This had a direct impact on the demand for laptops and desktops, as these demands shot up in the market. Earlier many employees used to work on office computers, but now with having to work from home and with several employees in many families, they all need a laptop or a desktop now. Collaborative technologies for official meetings are also on the rise and a smartphone is often not enough to cater to the heavy duty needs of these employees working from home.

Disrupted Supply Chain

This has led to several complications, as most laptops and desktops, as also most of other IT gadgets and their components are imported from China. With the outbreak of Coronavirus in China, manufacturing units have been shut and supply chains have been disrupted. Now the international borders in India also have been sealed and with a complete lockdown in India, the supply chains have also been disrupted. This means that in the initial weeks, the OEMs and the suppliers, distributors and other channel community members are finishing off their old stocks and meeting demands. In this initial phase, the ale of laptops and desktops increased multi-fold. However, this old stock has not lasted long. In a couple of weeks, it looks as if the old stock is about to finish. Hence, there has arisen a need to find a way out of this bottleneck.

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The Solutions

The channel community is exploring some alternative solutions to meet the demands for laptops and desktop, which according to one estimate from the channel community, has risen to almost 100%. There is not much clarity from the OEMs about how this demand is going to be met, according to one senior channel association leader. The rise in demand is not only from the IT sector, but from all sectors, as organisations in all sectors need their employees to work from home. This has increased the pressure on the distributors and suppliers.

There is a rise in the business of rental laptops and desktops as a consequence of all this. They are basically resorting to 3 strategies to meet this rise in the demand of laptops –

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1 – Renting rather than selling – With few laptops and desktops in stock and the ever-increasing demand, the suppliers have decided to rely more on renting out the computers in demand than sell them. This way, they can offset the rising pressure for supply with virtually no way to generate new stocks. For the consumers too, renting turns out to be cheaper and hence, they too prefer to go for renting than purchasing a laptop or a desktop.

2 – Outsourcing – If the suppliers don’t have enough computers, they outsource the demand to another supplier who may have the stock and this way, they can meet at least part of the demand. The outsourcing business works as a give-and-take system, where each helps the other to get orders, depending upon who has stocks.

3 – Tie-Ups – If several suppliers have part of the stocks that can meet a large order, they often tie up together to meet the demand and split the revenue among themselves. This way, they can meet the demand at least for some time and can also offset the loss accruing if they are not able to meet the demand at all.

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“Since the Covid-19 issue started, the sale of Laptop has increased drastically as many organisations are investing in buying laptops for their organisations. According to our sources, in a single day, a single SKU of a leading laptop manufacturer was sold in thousand numbers. However, on the other side, since the import is not happening for peripherals, the cost has increased.”

--Rajesh T, CEO, VB Computers, Madurai

 

“The situation is bad for retailers especially from the worst-affected cities. Many are afraid that the Corona virus will impact their staff through whom they might be getting. On the other side, the sale of network and broadband devices had increased.”

--Kaushik Pandya , President, FAIITA

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“The demand for laptops had increased many times which was above our inventory and hence, we had to outsource. When we outsource, we are never sure of the conditions of the laptops (since they are refurbished), the problem of replacement of faulty laptops had become a headache. After total lockdown it has become just impossible causing dent in our reputation.”

--JS Rekhi, Inforent Computers, New Delhi

Much of the responsibility for not being able to complete the demand goes to the OEMs. In their race to increase profits, they all depended completely on the Chinese manufacturing units and also compromised on the quality in the long run. Further, they didn’t keep an alternative in case of a contingency situation, such as has presented itself in the form of Coronavirus outbreak. If they had gradually built their manufacturing facilities in India, then today this situation had not arisen and the suppliers wouldn’t have faced this complication.

The OEMs were not available for comment on this issue.

Blessing in Disguise?

With the changed circumstance of computer usage, the Systems Integrators have found more opportunities for business. As the demand for more laptops rise and as the place of work of the employees has shifted, more and more people want the SIs for fresh installations, modifications of existing devices, integrating the computers with remote meeting and working tools and accessing the remote IT tools from home. This has set the service and solutions of the SIs into motion as more and more people want their services. The Coronavirus is changing the computer industry and service landscape in many different ways.

laptops coronavirus
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