CRN Network, December 15, 2011, 1230 hrs
Asus, under its retail expansion strategy, is targeting tier-1 and tier-2 cities to open its exclusive stores across the country. Under the same strategy, the company has opened an exclusive retail store in Gurgaon, and is planning to open one more before the end of 2011 to achieve its targeted figure of 10 stores in 2011. Asus has already set up eight exclusive stores in Bhillai, Goa, Thane, Jaipur, Calicut, Kolkata, and New Delhi (two locations).
“The setting up of Gurgaon store is a part of the company’s strategy to provide access to all the upcoming and latest technology to the customers in the Indian market including small cities and towns. Our focus is largely on small cities and towns as they allow faster break-even and profitability as compared to stores in metro cities. Due to availability of real estate at fairly lower prices, an exclusive store in tier-2 cities may achieve break-even in about 2-3 months as compared to about 6 months in a metro location. At the same time, small cities also offer large untapped sales opportunities. We have plans to set up 100 exclusive stores in 2012. However, in many of the metro and IT hub locations, we are focused on our presence in multi-branded stores,” explained Unaez Quraishi, Director, Sales and Distribution, System Business Group, Asus India.
The company is also planning to add Compuage as its national distributor apart from its current national distributor, Rashi Peripherals. “Compuage is currently our regional distributor for south and we are planning to upgrade it to national distributorship to enable deeper penetration of Asus products. We are also targeting to increase our current figure of 10 regional distributors to 15, and current five sub-distributors to about 15 in 2012. We are also planning to increase our 650 active partners strength to about 2000 partners in 2012,” he said.
According to the company, these steps are part of its target to become one of the top 3 brands in the notebook market in India in the next three years. “Asus is already number one in netbook segment and number three in consumer notebook segment in the global market. Almost 74 percent of the Asus global revenue comes from notebook segment. We target to become the number three notebook brand globally by 2013 and number one notebook brand by 2016,”Quraishi added.
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