After having launched its 'doorstep pick-up and replacement' initiative directed towards easing out the pain for its Indian channel community, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is targeting at achieving 25% market share of the Indian HDD market within a year.

“We want to be number one in this geography. This is our goal for the near future. At present, we have 10% to 12% market share in India. We are aiming at getting 25% market share within a year,” explained, Jaya Dharan, General Manager, Asia Pacific S&S HQ, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. 

The company's initiative towards providing doorstep pick-up for replacement is seen by many as a way to better establish the brand and help the channel community in concentrating more towards sales rather than managing the logistics. 

“India is a big market for us and we know that this market has its own unique requirements and that is why we have taken some initiatives exclusive for this geography. For instance, we have our five-year warranty program only for this region. And now we have just launched this channel focused initiative to provide replacement of HDDs right at our customer's doorstep,” he added. 

As part of this service program, a partner can register the complaint through a toll-free number, email or fax. The courier service, UPS, would pick up the faulty drive from the partner and deliver a new one within 72 hours. Within India, Neoteric Infomatique and CyberStar Infocom distribute Hitachi's products.

“With the launch of the Hitachi Service Support there is no need to set up service centers and no need to return hard drive units to other city. We are taking it upon ourselves to come and collect the drives from partners, no matter where in India the channel partner is based,” Dharan informed.

Commenting on the existing Indian gray market for HDDs, Dharan said that the company would not support products purchased from the gray market. “There are people selling our products after getting them directly from places like Singapore. However, I am sure that end-customers will see good reason not to buy our products from this gray market and would go to an authorized reseller only,” he explained. 

As India continues to attract investments by companies like LG, Nokia and Samsung directed towards manufacturing mobile handsets and other electronic equipment, Hitachi sees this as an opportunity to become a part of the overall IT ecosystem. This is set to open up new vistas for focused solution providers or system integrators who can play a critical role in terms of providing application specific content for Hitachi products. 

“When it comes to our products, we work very closely with local IT manufacturers like Zenith or HCL. Now keeping this mobile manufacturing activity in mind, we see a good opportunity for local solution providers to provide application specific content in this area,” explained, Karthik Laxman, Regional Manager–Channels, Hitachi Global Storage.

With an aim to encourage localized research and development in the consumer electronics form factor area, the company has its CE lab in China where innovative ideas to develop new form factors and products can be incubated. "Ideas can be incubated in our lab in China and we are quite open to doing it with Indian companies as well. With the emergence of products like digital video cameras, PVRs, smart phones, personal digital recorders, MP3 players and telematics, we sincerely believe that there is going to be a huge opportunity in this CE segment,” he explained.

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