Though Kingston's business in India has been affected by the slowdown, Wei Wei said that the company took quick business decisions which ensured it did not have to suffer negative growth. Now the company is strengthening its channels team to grow faster

Has the economic slowdown affected your company?
There is an impact on business in India. Being a privately held company, our decision-making process was very fast. Hence, we were able to weather the economic storm effectively.

We understood the impact on our Indian business much ahead of any other company in India and shifted our media budgets to channel completely. Even at this time of recession, it was not a negative growth for us. But, the growth rate was bit lower than what we expected. Like the US or Europe, APAC was not much affected due the economic slowdown. We allotted more resources to APAC region and were able to sustain this slowdown better.

What is the potential for Kingston products in India?
I definitely see potential for growth for all our products, particularly memory modules and flash products. In this space, I expect a huge growth in the next five years in India. As the infrastructure is getting established, the usage of desktops and laptops will grow in number, which will expand the demand for memory modules. We have identified that there is immense scope for memory modules. Hence, our immediate focus will be on this space.

What kind of support are you giving to your channel partners?
From marketing point of view, we conduct roadshows and we have loyalty programs to create bondage between channel partners and Kingston.

How are you focusing on the post-sales service of the products?
We have tied-up with Accel Frontline. They have coverage across 40 cities in India. In addition, we have a call center to address basic issues.

Whenever there are issues that cannot be addressed over phone, our customer can step into any of our service centers to get the problem fixed. Besides, we have trained service people to address the problem at the customer's place. Given the quality of our products, our statistics show that the failure rate is minuscule. For DRAM, we give lifetime warranty.

How Kingston sees the market for SSD? Where does it stand vis-à-vis its competitors in this space?
Kingston entered the SSD market in 2009. There's a big potential in the SSD market. Consumer's looking for better perfor-mance and consistency will most likely turn to SSDs. Once the cost is lowered to an affordable level, there will be a big growth in this segment. The market is an emerging one and more and more brands are entering this market. It's hard to position every brand now.

What is your channel network in India?
We have seven distributors in India now. For our DRAM modules, we have Neoteric Informatique for the western region; HCL Infosystems, Shree Pati Computers and Transtek Infoways for the North, South and East regions; and Compuage Infocom for North and South. For our flash products, we have Shree Pati Computers in the North; Sunrise Infosolutions in the West and HCL Infosystems, Compuage Infocom and Transtek Infoways for pan-India distribution.

Vasudevan N
vasudevann@cybermedia.co.in

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