Buffalo looks beyond distributors, to open stores in India


Bangalore: Even with the latest signing up of Ingram Micro as its second national distributor, Buffalo is all set to open its flagship store in New Delhi by end of September this year. Buffalo designs, develops and manufactures wired and wireless networking, storage and memory solutions the world over. Buffalo entered Indian shores four years ago and employed Supertron Electronics as its first national distributor. So with two national distributors under its arm, and plans of coming up with stores, Buffalo, a late entrant in the Indian market, is eyeing to expand its territory quicker. In an interaction, Satoshi Inaba, Assistant General Manager, Asia Pacific region, Buffalo informed about their plans of stores in India, their products and services, future strategies for India and more. While he confirmed the start of the New Delhi store, Inaba also added that Buffalo will come up with more stores in cities like Kolkata, Mumbai and Bangalore by 2011. When asked about what set Buffalo apart from its competitors, Inaba said, "We do the entire R&D by ourselves. We intend to become the one stop shop solution providers starting from pre sales to after sales services." While Buffalo shares all of its product profiles with the two distributors, the reason cited for launch of shops is to directly interact with the end users and get their reaction. Inaba added the products will be priced aggressively and will cater to both living room buyers and also SMEs and other large scale consumers. The Buffalo Summer Brochure handed to us at the interaction covered some interesting range of routers and storage devices. However we did not see much happening in their multimedia products. When asked to comment on the multimedia range, Inaba said they are working on new innovations which will help high-end users to share peer-to-peer data easily and are readying products that will allow wireless connection to TV sets. Buffalo aims to make a $6 million business in India this year and would like to take the mark to $15 million in the span of next three years.