''Our marketing spend over next 12 months would be five times more than last one year''

After Australia and Korea, India is the market with maximum potential for
AOpen's APac operations. Richard Lin was recently in the country to oversee
necessary groundwork being done for getting company's ambitious business plan
rolling. As a part of this plan, the company is currently setting up a wide
network of service centers, followed by marketing activities.

AOpen has been present in the country through its marketing arm Xserve for
quite some time now but one is yet to see any action from the company.  How
serious is it about the Indian market?

For AOpen's APac operations, the markets which hold maximum potential are
Australia, Korea and India, in that order. Also, after China, India is expected
to be one of the largest markets for IT. So needless to say, we are very serious
about the business here.

From this year onwards, our focus would be on the Indian market and we are
looking at replicating the kind of success here that we have achieved in Japan
and China over the last five-six years.

As a component solutions provider, we are already doing some good business
with few leading Indian PC OEMs and we would like to continue to act as their
partners. After that, we would invest in channel business to promote our wide
range of products. This range includes every PC component except CPU, memory and
hard disk, which are designed and manufactured by AOpen.

For the Indian market, we would be launching a series of exciting products in
the near future. First would be our vastly-recognized mainboards that would be
introduced in the second half of this year. Second would be the optical disk
drives, including combo drives and 16X DVD ROMs.

Third item that we want to introduce is the Mediacenter concept of products,
which consists of mini PCs. These range of products will ensure AOpen's reach
into the living rooms of Indian homes.

This would be followed by the launch of VGA cards to tap the booming gaming
market here. We are also working closely with Intel and its GIDs to promote the
built-to-order notebook concept in India.

Talking about our seriousness levels, we have a team in India developing
software applications to support our hardware.

There already exists heavy competition for all the products that you
intend to launch here. What then would be your USP?

As you know AOpen is a very focused company in the component business. We
keep investing a huge amount every year into R&D to develop newer products,
even much before the competition can do. Mediacenter PCs is one such example.
Apart from that being a favoring factor for us, we would also be investing a lot
on service and marketing in India.

This is why we set up XServe here so that they can provide service and
logistical support to the local customers. Also, we understand that India is a
very price-sensitive market, hence we would be adopting an aggressive pricing
strategy.

But if you make your pricing very aggressive, how will you be able to
ensure healthy margins for your partners?

Just like China, India is a market where we would first be required to
invest heavily, ensure that the people know us, channel has confidence in the
company, that we are serious in our business and not here to just do a trading
activity.

Also, we realize that India is a very sensitive market when it comes to
accepting a new brand. Hence, we want to invest a lot on our service
infrastructure here and look at this market from a long-term perspective.

AOPEN'S PRODUCT PORTFOLIO

So, to begin with, we would be not focusing so much on our
profitability as on partner's margins. Also, we would not be playing on price
alone. What we would be offering is value for money products backed by a
reliable support infrastructure. These two put together offers a very
interesting prospect for our partners.

You had tied up with a company called Anirox Technologies
last year to distribute some of your products. What came out of that
relationship?

Association with Anirox was to conduct a trial run of our products until
now. However, in the near future we would be rolling out a comprehensive channel
strategy and we are currently working on the same. Currently we are meeting
various channel partners in the country.

But more importantly we are making investment towards putting
our RMA services in place. We want to have a strong pre-sales and after-sales
infrastructure in place before we go all out with our channel business.

What is the kind of investments that you would be doing in
the Indian market?

We have eight RMA centers in the country and we plan to scale this up to 26
in one year's time. Our commitment to customers is replacement within 48 hours
in any location in the country and hence we would put in resources to ensure
that it

happens.

On marketing front, we are ready to invest five times more in
the next one year than what we did last year. We would also be conducting a
series of roadshows to promote our Mediacenter PCs in September-October time
frame in the major cities.

GOLDIE