ViewSonic to make a come-back in CRT market

After keeping a low profile in the Indian monitor business for many years,
ViewSonic Corp is all set to make a come-back. The vendor, which was
concentrating only on LCD and high-end monitors, will be launching a range of
CRT monitors with aggressive pricing through its two distributors in Mumbai
soon.

"ViewSonic regards India as a very important and critical market. With
an aggressive and complete strategy, ViewSonic is targeting the top-5 to top-3
slot for year 2005 in India. We have been planning this for a long time and was
waiting for a good timing to execute our plans," said Amy Wu, Director -
Strategic Business Development SBU, ViewSonic International.

In the last few years, the popularity of Korean giants like Samsung and LG
almost wiped out ViewSonic from the CRT monitor business in India. The local
manufacturing presence of both these companies helped them bring down cost and
avail exemptions on duties, making imported monitors costlier.

However, the recent development arising out of the Budget announcements
narrowed the gap between a locally manufactured monitor and a imported monitor
to just 4%. Imported monitors are now only 4% costlier than the local makes,
which earlier was about 10% costlier.

"We focused more on value-added niche market in the past due to high
tariff limit for importer. With new WTO agreement, in addition to maintaining
the consistency in CRT monitors, we would have wider range of LCD monitors and
provide much better services to serve our partners and customers, especially in
B and C class cities," said Amy.

ViewSonic distributors feel that the 4% price gap is not significant to be
worried about. The prices will be more or less similar to the popular models
available in the country. In the case of LCD monitors, the distributors feel,
ViewSonic will be the cheapest compared the popular models in the market.

The two distributors of ViewSonic: Roop Technologies and Priya, both from
Mumbai, will make available two different ranges of monitors for the Indian
market.

Because of the narrowed price difference, it now makes more sense for
ViewSonic to be aggressive in the Indian market with CRT monitors. Earlier,
ViewSonic was active only in the LCD and high-end monitor business.

NELSON JOHNY