By Priyanka Chowdhury
Toshiba India has chalked out an aggressive market strategy to achieve its goal of becoming a top contender in the notebook segment within the next 15 months.
To get there, the company plans to almost quadruple its retail partner network. “Retail will be core to our strategy as we are seeing consumer demand outstrip enterprise demand. Hence we have an aggressive strategy to increase our exclusive retail franchise (shopToshiba) from the existing 45 outlets to 150 by March 2010. We expect the network of non-exclusive franchisees (iShops) to grow from the present 345 stores to 1,000 during the same period,” said Sivakumar N, Country Manager, Toshiba India.
Core to the Toshiba’s massive retail expansion will be market coverage. “Currently we have a coverage of 20 cities through our retail franchise. During the next two years, we plan to increase our market coverage to 75 cities,” added Sivakumar.
On the commercial side of the business too, Toshiba is aggressively looking at expanding its base of corporate resellers. “Since we restructured our distribution set-up in April 2008, we have increased our base of enterprise resellers from 17 to 55. Broad basing our distribution and the consistency of our channel programs over the past six months, have helped enroll many new partners in this space,” said Sivakumar.
It may be recalled that in April 2008, Toshiba revamped its entire distribution. Earlier it had one master distributor, HCL Infosystems who imported products and billed locally to distributors like Redington, Ingram Micro and Compuage. “In April, we began importing the products ourselves and started rupee billing to our distributors. This helped remove an additional layer of master distributor. Presently, all four distributors resell our products in the market which has provided us wider reach and penetration,” added Sivakumar.
The local logistics was complimented by the creation of a strong support infrastructure. “Starting April we have scaled our support to 65 centers in 26 cities in partnership with three national ASPs namely HCL, RT Outsourcing and TVSE. The physical post-sales service is supplemented by toll-free and web-led support. With our footprint expanding, we will expand our support reach as well,” said Sivakumar.
But moving from 4 percent market share to number 3 spot will indeed be an uphill task for Toshiba. “What will work in our favor is our focus on sell-out unlike other vendors who are simply focused on sell-in. In a slowdown when every PC vendor is troubled with channel inventory, our channels have little or no inventory. Going forward, this strategy will help us get more channel mindshare and help us attain the target position,” averred Sivakumar. |