Acer India to target corporates with notebooks

Acer India, the wholly-owned Indian subsidiary of the Taiwanese IT hardware giant, plans to focus on the corporate segment with their notebooks soon, something they did not till now.

According to S Rajendran, general manager "� sales and marketing, consumer product group, "Corporates are definitely a huge potential market for us. Therefore, we do not shun them. We are looking to focus on the market and potentially will do so in 2006."

Acer's notebooks in the market have consistently given an impression of being targeted at the small and medium business (SMB) and home segment.

This impression has been reinforced by the aggressive price tags that Acer has been selling its notebooks with. It is the latest in the line of entry level notebooks, the AMD Mobile Simpron based Aspire 1362, is priced just below Rs 40,000.

But Rajendran denies a consistent focus on SMBs and says that they have not moved on the corporate market in a big way simply because the modalities had not been worked out within the organisation yet.

"We are not geared to target the corporate market yet. We still have to get our act together. By that I mean, better structured vertical focus on the segment as an identified market space, the addition of channel partners and consolidation of our brand acceptance and our gains so far. When all that is done, we will be ready to take the step," says Rajendran.

He adds that Acer's push into the corporate world is likely to be handled by the consumer products division and that the push might not necessitate an introduction of new notebook models.

Notebooks contribute 65 per cent of the revenues of the consumer products group division, only 20 per cent of which comes from non-consumer clients which includes the government and BFSI segments.

The division itself brings in only 30 per cent of the total Indian revenues, which was estimated by IDC to be around Rs 396 crore in 2003.

According to Rajendran, desktops have been growing around 50 per cent, while notebooks have been doubling in unit terms over the last one year. One of the reasons for this growth is Acer's push into the retail segment.

"There are two types of retail setups. One is the Acer Point and the other is the Acer Mall. Acer Points are multi brand outfits, while Acer Mall is totally dedicated to the company's own products. We have around 112 retail outlets now and this will be increased to 200 by end of 2005," he said.

Around one third of these outlets are Acer Malls. Over 25 per cent of total sales in the consumer segment comes from the retail outlets now and this is expected to increase to 45 per cent this year.

Acer India was set up as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Acer Computer International in 1999. The company's products in India includes servers, desktops, notebooks, projectors and storage devices.

The consumer products division includes notebooks, desktops and peripherals while the rest of the products are handled by the enterprise products division.