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What Acer did in India

Harish Revanna
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Harish Revanna
Since last summer, Acer India has been upbeat. This can be attributed to the ‘think globally, act locally’ strategy that the company implemented in retailing its product. For the first time in India, Acer rock bottomed its product prices so much that laptops, until then a corporate personnel’s arsenal, was available at throwaway price even to students in undergraduate studies.

Competitors were nudged by a one-time, sudden reduction of Rs.20,000 on Acer laptops that was until a week back upwards of Rs.50,000. It was not a joke, but Acer had cracked it. The man behind this pricey joke, but yet inexpensive, was Sudarsanam Rajendran, General Manager of sales and marketing of the consumer product group (CPG).

Acer had not ventured into consumer segment of market until three years after establishing in 2000. The company throughout knew that 60 percent of their market was lying there and they were losing it. “We had to build a brand image in the country and along with that increase our infrastructure. So we consciously stayed out of the consumer market concentrating more on the enterprise sector,” says Rajendran.

For him, infrastructure development meant building distribution partners, channel partners, an operation support network and all prerequisites that would enable infrastructure indirectly. Soon, Acer had built its base of partners and the company jumped into the consumer bandwagon.

Acer’s Consumer group is today a three-legged entity focused on the mass market, representing Small Office Home Office (SOHO), Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) and user segments. Although the enterprise segment was the only revenue producer for Acer until 2003, its newly launched consumer group soon emerged grabbing the market with 30 percent of Acer’s revenue in its exchequer.


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