While different global brands in the memory space are continuously trying hard to entrench themselves in the Indian marketplace, these efforts are being challenged by a parallel memory market. Originating from countries like Nepal, this market is fuelled by sudden price fluctuations and a satta bazaar is flourishing because of the constant price fluctuations.

The resellers who specialize in satta dealings are said to have political as well as mafia contacts, which help them in executing the deals in a flawless manner.

“This is a very big business out here. Different commodities of daily use are traded in the satta bazaar and in information technology sector, it is predominantly the memory business comprising of RAMs and other related products that are of interest to the dealers of the market. Most often, the goods are coming from Nepal and than it gets funneled to other regional markets via Gorakhpur,” informed a big IT reseller from Allahabad on condition of anonymity.

How it works?
Satta is a way of doing business in a hidden manner, not much is known about it in the public domain. Investigations undertaken by The DQ Week revealed that timed bets are made on big quantities of memory and prices fluctuate on the availability of memory on the day of opening of the bet.

“You have to place a bet that you will buy X amount of memory for Y amount of money for a certain number of days in the near future. Now these dealers of memory keep changing the sta-tus of stock available with them and with this changing status, the price also fluctuates to a great extent. That is how people make or loose money in the memory game. I stopped playing as in one single day I lost more than Rs 8 lakh,” the reseller from Allahabad added.

As operators might decide not to physically buy anything, there are times when this game allows memory-focused resellers to make money just by betting big and than diverting the stock to someone else's lap.

“Many people do it, it is just like hawala, you do not need to actually buy anything and yet can make money out of it. Timing of the bet is very important here as most of the times, it is the timing that gets you more money than anything else,” he further explained.

With IT business expanding to small regions, the satta business is also moving towards the up-country market rapidly. “There was a time when only a selected few from big cities like New Delhi or Mumbai used to execute big orders. But today, the situation has changed and now more and more IT business is moving towards small locations. This is fanning the satta business within memory, as it is quite easy to sell memory to small and big regional assemblers,” he added.

It is very difficult to gauge the size of this business activity, as it is all being done in an unorganized manner. Interestingly, different resellers from places like Varanasi or even Lucknow are becoming a part of this growing trend, but memory-focused companies are not troubled by this phenomemon.

“We know that this type of business activity exists. There are certain big people from metros who are also involved in this. But we are not that bothered about this business. We sincerely feel that the government should do more to check these activities, however, we know that these people will not be able to directly compete with global brands,” added an official from a memory-focused company in New Delhi.

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