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Arun Kakkar
President,
Ghaziabad Computers Association
How big is the Ghaziabad IT market?
The market here comprises of 100 active resellers selling around 1000 PCs monthly. It has grown exponentially oat a CAGR of 40 percent over the last five years. However, the recent slowdown in the market has affected the business. The sales have dipped to as much as 50 percent post Diwali.
What are the drivers for IT growth?
The city is a commercial hub for many industries like bicycles, which fuel the IT industry. Besides this, the education segment is also quite strong here. The city has a number of engineering colleges and management institutes. The education segment contributes 35 percent to the demand, followed by 10 percent from the home segment while 45 percent of the demand is jointly generated by the corporate and government segments.
What are the buying trends?
From peripherals to workstations, most of the hardware products do substantial business in the city. In sharp contrast to other cities, the ratio of desktops to notebooks is the same here. The notebooks’ demand is primarily stimulated by the student community, while the home users prefer desktops.
What are the key challenges facing resellers?
The emergence of large format stores has affected our business considerably. Today, Ghaziabad has a number of malls and each of these malls have at least one such store. From Big Bazaar to Next, all of them sell IT products. Roughly about 40 percent of our business has been lost to such stores.
Besides this, we face stiff competition from larger players from Delhi, who because of their large volumes undercut us on prices leading to margin erosion.
What are the activities organized by your association?
Ghaziabad Computers Association is an eight-year old association and has 80 members. We ensure that we organize one major event in a year to bring together both vendors and channels. It could either be in the form of an exhibition or any cultural event. We are equally active in taking up issues and solving them. |