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Customised Notebooks Fuelling Demands
By
Sandhya Malhotra
Delhi, Apr 7, 2007
Not great starters among partners, build-to-order notebooks or assembled laptops are again finding takers prompting the channel to chart out renewed roadmap to tap this opportunity.
Despite channel partners and corporate sectors shying away from assembled notebooks, partners are soon realizing that there is quantum leap in demand of the same amongst SMB, education and home segments.
Delhi- based Sandeep Bansal, director of Edge Infocom was the first among the north-India based reseller to roll out Intel's build-to-order notebook in the market in 2003. He says, "There's already a significant demand among SMB segment." The remarks only highlight the emerging global trend that the demand for customized notebooks is on the rise.
Agreeing with him, Gaurav Gupta, director, MB solutions, "Worldwide the intake of Build-to-order notebook trend was very slow but now for last few years the trend is changing. The demands for customized notebooks have started increasing in India as well."
It is in this context, he say he gets more than 5000 inquiries across India for build-to-order notebooks.
"We sell more than 400 pieces of notebooks in a month and the major chunk of orders come from education followed by SMB and home," he said adding while 50-60 per cent comes from education segment, 20 per cent belongs to SMB and the remaining can be attributed to home segment.
"Now we are looking at retail and lifestyle market as a big market for us and planning to open 3 new outlets in Delhi and parts of national capital region," Gupta says adding, "We want to create education amongst end customers on customized notebooks to create more awareness for build to order notebooks."
The market watchers say that the Intel build-to-order program was a major hit no doubt but it was difficult to sell the concept to end customers as the sale of branded laptops surged ahead.
Presently, however, the situation and availability of notebooks components are better than five years back. "Earlier lose components and spare parts were the main barriers to deal with customized notebooks," says B. Bhushan, director RR systems. He also agreed that only a few active channel partners are involved in business with assembled notebooks and these are limited to metros regions only.
Sandeep Aurora, director sales and marketing group South Asia Intel, however, does not share the optimism of partners saying the market is still perhaps status quo on the demand for assembled notebooks.
But he said the partners should not find much difficulty in dealing with the product line from his company. "The channel can start the business. They have to just buy the bare bone and start assembling their own laptops. The major factor is compatibility or inter-changeable options, which is not currently available with any branded laptop."
He further says partners could import bare bone from Taiwan- based original design manufacturers (ODMs) like Cleovo, Uniwill, Vistron and Compel, which is the key component in the notebooks. Intel is also supporting its partners in terms of service, and technical training.
Gupta agrees that for setting up assembled notebook business it requires huge infrastructure. There were several partners like Kochi-based Bloom and Bangalore-based Micro D who began this business but latter withdrew due to low sales in the market.
Bansal says, "Providing national service support on notebooks is critical part of the business. Before stepping into this business the partner should ensure to provide strong pre and post national service support to its end customers. We offer three year warranties on our notebooks starting from entry level to hi-light style at the price point of Rs 25,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh."
Harping on his optimism line, says Gupta various third party companies like Nvidia, Redhat and Microsoft are backing up customized notebooks selling partners. "We are looking to increase the market share for our notebooks and partners should see the growth in profitability in selling build to order notebooks rather selling OEMs brands at a very low margins," adds Gupta.
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