"We intend roping in Intel premier providers to sell our server solutions"

As the newly-appointed MD for Asus India, Andrew Tsui’s topmost priority is to scale up his manpower. After making Mumbai as the company headquarters, he is looking at getting nearly 100 people in his team to enhance Asus’ reach and relationship with partners as well as end-users. He also hints at the possibility of having newer distributors.

Asus has had its direct presence in the country for over three years. Why
then did the company take so long to appoint an MD for India?

In Asia, some of the biggest markets for Asus are Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia,
Korea and China. It’s only since last year that we have started witnessing a
phenomenal growth in the overall PC market in the country.

Andrew Tsui MD, Asus India

So naturally, while the company had its direct presence for some time now, it
also realized that this was indeed the right time for it to have an MD here.
Therefore, I don’t believe that Asus has been late as such to have a senior
person in the country.

What kind of resources would the company pump in the country to further
grow its market?

The most important resource that the company is going to invest on is
manpower. We are making Mumbai as our headquarters and over the next few months,
we would be having about 15 people working out of Mumbai. I believe that by end
of this year, the Asus Indian team would have 100 members in it. And this number
might grow next year

as well.

We would also put in place a high-end communication system in place across
various Asus India offices, to enable real-time flow of information. Being a
dynamic business that IT is, it would also help us take decisions far faster.
This would also be backed by adequate investments on providing higher levels of
service to our end-customers.

With Asus adding on newer products and increasing its
manpower, would it also consider bringing about a change in its distribution
network?

Currently we have five distributors in the country. However, if you would
notice, none of our product categories are dealt by more than two or three
distys. So this has helped us avoid channel conflict.

But at the same time, until now Asus had only its component
business in the country. Now we plan to offer a wider range of other products
like servers, desktops, notebooks, mobile phones, digicams and networking
products.

So obviously, our first preference would be to offer these
new products through our current set of distys. However, if we see a need to
have newer distys in our fold, which could even include any of the top three
national distys, we would consider that

as well.

PC Component Provider Broadband Solution Provider System & Open VerticalIntegration Server & Backbone & InterNetworking Information Appliance Wireless Networking Existing products  To be launched shortly Not launched in India

But if our existing set of distributors can do justice to our
other product lines as well, there won’t be any reason for us to look beyond
them.

So what kind of product launches have you envisaged in the
near future for the Indian market?

Currently Asus offers product in the PC component space, which is mainly
motherboards, VGA cards and ODDs. Over the next year or so we would be
introducing products for the systems integration space.

These would be typically barebone PCs, servers, RAID, LCD PC
as well few other components like casing and power supply. As Indian market
grows up, one can also expect to see information appliances and WLAN products
being rolled out by us.

Tell us more about your barebone PCs?

We have introduced the Pundit range of barebone PCs in the country. The
Pundit carries advantages in terms of its dimension, cost-effectiveness and
futuristic designs. It is also very low on acoustics, offers complete multimedia
functions including home theater features and showcases multiple input/output
ports on the front panel making it extremely consumer-friendly.

What positioning strategy would Asus adopt for its range
of servers, which incidentally is a highly competitive product space?

As a strategy, we are not going to fight for the space which the likes of HP
and IBM currently rule over. At the same time we see a vast opportunity for us
as the demand for servers is rapidly increasing.

We aim to offer very cost-effective and technologically
reliable server solutions. For this, we intend roping in Intel premier providers
to sell our server solutions. For our server business, they are the right kind
of partners to take our products to the market.

GOLDIE