Cartel And Price Difference Plague Agra Channel

After covering nearly five cities, IT Panchayat, conducted by The DQ Week and
DQ Channels, made its next stop at Agra. The event was attended by more than 100
channel partners.

On the panel, the distributor's side was represented by Hitesh Kumar Rajput
from Ingram Micro and Raheenul Hasan from Redington, while Khalid H Rizvi from
Simco Computer Systems, Vipul Garg from Expert Solutions and Amit Kumar Gupta
from Arush & Co represented the dealer community in Agra.

Kuldeep Singh Sikerwar of Sunrise Systems raised the problem of cartel
formation and price difference. "Partners in the city and nearby regions are
plagued with this issue, and we are desperately seeking an answer to this," he
said.

To this, Rajput replied that they are not the right people to solve this
problem or give a suitable answer to this. He suggested that the vendors should
be the ones to be approached in this regard.

Another issue bothering the Agra channel community is that of price
difference. They claimed that product prices offered to channels in smaller
cities are higher than that offered in bigger cities. "To get better prices, we
still have to go to markets like Lucknow or Ghaziabad, where there are more
chances of earning better margins because of lower prices for channel partners,"
Sikerwar shared.

Khalid H Rizvi from Simco Computer Systems, Vipul Garg from Expert Solutions and Amit Kumar Gupta from Arush & Co

Distributors present on the panel could not give satisfactory replies to the
questions raised.

A mass request from the channel community of Agra to The DQ Week was that
they wanted representatives from vendors on the panel to solve their issues,
since distributors either are not able to satisfy their queries or in most cases
direct partners to approach vendor companies for the same.

The Panchayat started with presentations from Nitin Kumar Sharma of Sify
Technology, Krishan Kumar Gupta of Busy Infotech, Mehvish Asghar of RP
Infosystems (makers of Chirag computers), and Prabhat Dubey of Delta UPS. Busy
Infotech shared details about the company's new products and plans, and
announced an offer for channel partners, according to which they could buy
accounting, inventory and billing software at Rs 199.

Delta UPS and Busy Infotech were the Gold Partners for the event, while
Chirag, Sify, Supercomp and Supertron Electronics were the Associate Partners.

Rachna Gupta

rachnag@cybermedia.co.in