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Ajay Parmar
Proprietor,
Megabyte Computers
How big is the Dharamshala IT market?
Dharamshala is more of a tourist attraction, and with 23 active resellers the IT market is doing decent business. Each partner sells around 50 PCs in a month. The market has been estimated to be growing at 30 percent.
What are the drivers for IT growth?
There are no corporates in Dharamshala. Government business also doesn’t exist since all IT purchases have to be made through the HP State Electronic Corporation. The dominant segment is the home, then there’s a very small SOHO segment. The presence of a large number of educational institutes like NIIT helps in driving the IT business. The student community propels the demand for notebooks. Due to them, 15 notebooks get sold every month.
Nearly 85 percent of the market belongs to the home segment which also includes the student community. The remaining 15 percent is contributed by SOHOs.
What are the buying trends?
It’s a very small market for IT, with no major shift seen toward any new product. People here are not tech-savvy enough to experiment with new products. Only a handful of people, maybe around 5 percent, primarily students, go in for accessories like TV tuner cards.
Which are the key challenges faced by resellers?
There are lots of issues that need to be sorted out as a small business like ours cannot survive otherwise. There is huge price difference in the products available in Chandigarh which is just two hours drive from here. Also, vendors these days are looking to sign on anyone and everyone to sell their brand. This leads to a clash of interests, and we are left with margins of Rs 50 or Rs 100 at the higher side.
Though post-warranty support is not an issue since most major vendors have a service center in Himachal. We want them hold regular training programs as well as channel meets.
Does your association organize any activities?
We do not have any association here. All our earlier efforts to form an association went waste as not many were interested. However, I will give it a try again and try to reach some consensus. |