Harish Kohli has been with Acer even before the Taiwanese computer hardware maker launched its Indian subsidiary in 1999 after calling off a joint venture (JV) with Wipro. Kohli has now taken over as managing director of Acer India. In an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, he tells that Acer India’s focus is not just to garner market share, but to have a profitable growth. Edited excerpts:
You have been part of Acer India for the past 12 years. How is the journey so far?
Personally for me, the journey at Acer India has been very interesting. It is like sowing a seed and then seeing the plant coming out of it. It always gives you a good feeling that you have also contributed in watering and providing manure to it.
Is there going to be any change in strategy under your leadership?
The good part of Acer is that it had been a very good participative management company. Majority of us are part and parcel of every decision being taken by the company. So there is nothing really which (former managing director Y S) Mukund has to pass on to us. It’s more of business as usual for the company.
In the Q3 this year you slipped to number 4 position India from earlier No 2. Now that you have increased the PC prices, will it not affect your growth?
We announced the price increase on September 16 with immediate effect. That has affected our numbers in Q3.
However, the gap between number two, three and four PC players in India is quite small. One small deal that we are able to execute in a quarter can make all the difference. As far as price increase is concerned, we believe that market share is transit in nature. For us, sustainable organisation is the most important thing, and you can only sustain provided you are profitable.
But there are still some players who are yet to decision on price hike?
It could be that I might be carrying an extra inventory which I might have tried to offload. It is little surprising to me that somebody makes so much profit that he can actually forgo as far as profit is concerned. After spending 29 years in the IT industry, I know for sure that it’s difficult to make double-digit profit in this industry.
Won’t the short supply of hard disk drives affect some of the commitments you have already made?
It may not be as severe for large manufacturers like us, but definitely it is a big issue for the smaller ones. Despite having contractual obligations with large PC vendors, hard-disk manufacturers are able to supply 60-70 of overall demands.
More From This Section
Are your plants running in full capacity right now?
Yes. Because we executed some of the large contracts including an order from the Gujarat government. This was one of the largest orders this year. We executed a small portion of the Gujarat order in Q3; a large portion of it is being executed in Q4.
You are quite strong in the education segment, especially the school education. What about the higher education part?
There is not any data that would tell you your market share in the school education (K-12) space. But we would have a share of close to 55 per cent in this segment -- and that is something we have been maintaining for the last 6-7 years. We focus on higher education space in certain geographies that we pre-decide.
What changes do you see in consumer buying?
One change which is happening in India is that consumers are preferring to buy from places closer to their stay rather than travelling quite far to buy a desktop or laptop. This means a lot of buying is shifting to the smaller towns. There are 4,100 cities in India with a population of more than 100,000. We are expecting to cover 2,000 such cities by end of 2012.