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Neeraj Gupta
Joint Secretary,
MCDA
How big is the Moradabad IT market?
Opportunities in Moradabad market are limited since it is a small market. It has about 80 active resellers, selling a total of nearly 500 PCs, of which 200 are desktops and the rest are notebooks. The market here has been growing at the rate of 25 percent over the past couple of years.
What are the drivers for IT growth?
The home users are the main demand drivers contributing to 75 percent of sales. The remaining 25 percent of demand is generated by SMBs and government offices, wherein SMBs command a major share. The demand for the government offices is generally taken care of by their respective head offices, hence their contribution to the demand locally is minimal.
What are the customer buying trends?
There is clear a shift in consumer preference towards notebooks. Today, the ratio of desktops to notebooks is 40:60. The consumer preference depends substantially on resellers and is influenced heavily by the guidance and marketing skills of resellers.
What are the key challenges faced by resellers in the city?
The first and foremost concern is the lack of service support. None of the vendors have a service centre here nor do they take any intiative to impart training to partners. The second issue is that of profitability. None of the resellers are able to make a profit of more than Rs 100.
To add to that, we have two percent entry tax on PCs in Uttar Pradesh, which implies that the products are priced higher here. As a result, people prefer to buy these products from Delhi.
Since business from resellers is not significant, vendors do not take any initiatives to educate the partners.
What are the activities organized by your association?
Our association was defunct for a long time but we decided to revive it in December 2008 and re-christened it as Moradabad Computer Dealer Association (MCDA). Recently, we elected new office bearers. Currently, we have around 67 members and we intend to increase the number of members to 80 in a month.
Our agenda is to bring in vendors to our city and impart training to members. We also intend to take up the issue of service centres with the vendors. |