Abhijeet Mukherjee, CRN, December 6, 2011, 0930 hrs
Kingston is betting heavily on Indian memory module market, and hopes to capture 50 percent of market share over a five year period. Kingston has around 15 percent market share presently, and lags behind Transcend and has stiff competition from brands such as Strontium, Om Nanotech and Zion among others.
Ann Bai, DRAM Memory Sales Director, Kingston APAC region said, “I think in five years we would be able to achieve 50 percent market share in India. The Indian desktop market is still healthy and the system builder market is still significant.”
At just less than a million units a quarter, the Indian memory module market is billed to be around Rs 360 crore this year.
For the next 2-3 years Kingston’s thrust would be to improve awareness among customers and resellers about its DRAM modules. “Our marketing activities would be focused on creating awareness among customers and the channel. Our focus would also be to increase frequency of our channel activities, programs and involve more resellers,” Bai said.
To increase its reach Kingston has a two pronged approach. Firstly, it wants to increase its reseller base by 60 percent by next year. The company currently has close to 2,000 resellers pan India, and the rise would take the total count to around 3,200. It also plans to start selling DRAM modules through e-commerce sites. “We have seen a very encouraging response in other parts of the world where we sell our products through popular e-commerce sites like Amazon. We plan to introduce something similar in India very soon. Currently we are in the planning stage,” she said.
Bai admitted that awarenes of the brand is largely limited to the top tier cities. In the next two years, it plans to spread evenly across the top 10 cities, and in the next five years it intends to spread to the tier-2 and tier-3 cities. “We would leverage our relationships with our distributors: Avnet, Compuage Infocom, HCL Infosystems, Ingram Micro, Neoteric Infomatique, ShreePati Computech and Transtek Infoways, to achieve the goal,” said Bai. |