By Varun Aggarwal, CRN, October 6, 2009, 1230 hrs
With notebook sales overpowering desktop shipments, HCL Infosystems is doing all it can to retain its share in the consumer PC market.
The country’s second-largest PC player has traditionally done well in the consumer segment on the back of its strong performance in the desktop space. In the notebook space it has been a laggard.
According to Gartner, in Q2 2009, HCL had only 4 percent market share in the consumer notebook segment. The top three vendors—HP, Dell and Acer—totaled more than 60 percent market share.
In order to create a strong mindshare and market share in the notebook segment, HCL is now rebranding its notebook business with a complete portfolio refresh and a new marketing campaign.
The new campaign revolves around the concept of Mobile Excitement (ME), and is targeted predominantly at the youth.
The ME range will replace the company’s entire range of laptops including its flagship Leaptop range. “This is the largest-ever branding and marketing exercise by HCL since our inception in 1976. Apart from a new brand, new product portfolio with features reflecting the new brand positioning, and significant investments in advertising, we will completely revamp and rebrand our HCL Digilife stores,” informed Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman, HCL Infosystems.
The ME range incorporates several new features that HCL says are industry firsts. These include the Lock ME feature which prevents unauthorized persons from copying data to external storage devices; Secure ME which locks any application installed on the PC; and Encrypt ME which encrypts selected data on the hard drive. The new notebooks also come with face recognition and fingerprint recognition technologies.
Commenting on HCL’s rebranding initiative in the mobile PC segment, Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner India, said, “It is clear that it will be tough for HCL to compete head-on with multinationals like HP, Dell and Acer in the notebook space. In order to do well the company will have to create a unique positioning.”
According to Gartner, the consumer notebook segment is increasingly getting segmented at the premium-end and the low-end. “It’s in the mid-range price-performance category that HCL needs to position its ME range,” opined Chakraborti. “This is the segment that wants notebooks which come with certain useful features, have strong post-sales support, and are yet available at a comfortable price. HCL has the potential to become a top-3 player if it gets its branding right.” |