Hitachi invests for marketing and technical support in India

DQC News Bureau

New Delhi:  Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST has
announced it will enhance marketing and technical support in India to increase
its market share in the country. Currently, supporting service is provided by
Hitachi GST's authorized distribution partners, Cyberstar Infocom, Neoteric
Infomatique and Redington.

“We felt the need to be close to our worldwide and local OEM customers, who
are boosting their manufacturing operations in India. This initiative will
provide more comprehensive support to the channel, which plays a key role in the
dissemination and usage of our high quality hard drives in various applications
right across the country,” said Robert Chu, VP, Asia Pacific, Hitachi GST.

Apart from the desktop and notebook category, Hitachi GST sees a huge market
in consumer electronic (CE) applications such as digital set top box, digital
video recorders, personal video recorders, as these are also giving rise to
demand for high-capacity hard drives across form factors. To capture this market
opportunity, Hitachi GST launched the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 family. Now the
CinemaStar family of drives has been launched to address the growing demand in
the CE segment, with capacity of up to 1TB.

“India is a highly important market for Hitachi GST and we see immense
potential for growth in the traditional IT and emerging non-IT segments. The
enhanced marketing and technical support program is a strategic step to help us
get closer to the market and enhance our go-to-market capabilities. Overall,
this will help us consolidate our position in the market and accentuate the
existing growth momentum,” added Chu.

In a related announcement, Hitachi GST also announced that Karthik Laxman
will be promoted to Country Manager of India and SAARC region. Laxman will be
primarily responsible for growth in the market as well as enhancing the company's
channel and OEM alliances in India. The announcement is part of Hitachi GST's
global strategy to strengthen its capabilities within India which is one of the
world's fastest growing hard disk drive markets.

Giving an insight into the latest trends in the disk and storage areas,
Laxman said, “Consumerism is growing and the market is moving from analog to
digital. Hence there is a huge growth opportunity in areas like video
surveillance especially the verticals of banking, government, and SOHO and we
would want to maximize on the same. Since our distributors have a strong set of
channel partners and a pan India presence, the scope for growth is huge.”

He further added that Hitachi would work to educate partners about the
products, cost of ownership and strengthen their warranty and service support
further. The company also has a web portal wherein a reseller or partner can
register his complaint and within a day someone from the tech support team would
get the matter sorted out. However the above is restricted only to the metros.
For the B&C class cities, when a partner registers a complaint the services
would be outsourced to a local service provider.