Though Kingston's business in India has been affected by the slowdown, Wei
Wei said that the company took quick business decisions which ensured it did not
have to suffer negative growth. Now the company is strengthening its channels
team to grow faster
Has the economic slowdown affected your company?
There is an impact on business in India. Being a privately held company, our
decision-making process was very fast. Hence, we were able to weather the
economic storm effectively.
We understood the impact on our Indian business much ahead of any other
company in India and shifted our media budgets to channel completely. Even at
this time of recession, it was not a negative growth for us. But, the growth
rate was bit lower than what we expected. Like the US or Europe, APAC was not
much affected due the economic slowdown. We allotted more resources to APAC
region and were able to sustain this slowdown better.
What is the potential for Kingston products in India?
I definitely see potential for growth for all our products, particularly
memory modules and flash products. In this space, I expect a huge growth in the
next five years in India. As the infrastructure is getting established, the
usage of desktops and laptops will grow in number, which will expand the demand
for memory modules. We have identified that there is immense scope for memory
modules. Hence, our immediate focus will be on this space.
What kind of support are you giving to your channel partners?
From marketing point of view, we conduct roadshows and we have loyalty
programs to create bondage between channel partners and Kingston.
How are you focusing on the post-sales service of the products?
We have tied-up with Accel Frontline. They have coverage across 40 cities in
India. In addition, we have a call center to address basic issues.
Whenever there are issues that cannot be addressed over phone, our customer
can step into any of our service centers to get the problem fixed. Besides, we
have trained service people to address the problem at the customer's place.
Given the quality of our products, our statistics show that the failure rate is
minuscule. For DRAM, we give lifetime warranty.
How Kingston sees the market for SSD? Where does it stand vis-Ã -vis its
competitors in this space?
Kingston entered the SSD market in 2009. There's a big potential in the SSD
market. Consumer's looking for better perfor-mance and consistency will most
likely turn to SSDs. Once the cost is lowered to an affordable level, there will
be a big growth in this segment. The market is an emerging one and more and more
brands are entering this market. It's hard to position every brand now.
What is your channel network in India?
We have seven distributors in India now. For our DRAM modules, we have
Neoteric Informatique for the western region; HCL Infosystems, Shree Pati
Computers and Transtek Infoways for the North, South and East regions; and
Compuage Infocom for North and South. For our flash products, we have Shree Pati
Computers in the North; Sunrise Infosolutions in the West and HCL Infosystems,
Compuage Infocom and Transtek Infoways for pan-India distribution.
Vasudevan N
vasudevann@cybermedia.co.in