MA Mannan, Country Manager, Corsair Memory, in an interview with Kapil Mudholkar talks about India plans, and upcoming market trends. Excerpts…
Please elaborate on your brand building activities in India.
Corsair views brand building in India as a multi-year process. The India PC gaming market is estimated to be growing at around 20-25 percent annually. And we expect to gain from this growth. Our specific brand building activities include road shows along with distributor-organized channel meets in major cities.
Any new products in the pipeline?
Corsair is diversifying and adding new product lines that further cater to the gaming segment. We are preparing to launch Corsair H50 CPU cooler in India during mid-August. The H50 carries a 2-year warranty, and is priced similar to market leading high-end air cooling CPU coolers.
How are you placing products in India market?
Our products are presently distributed through national distributors – Inspan Infotech and Tirupati Enterprises. Beneath these two distributors, we have a national network of sub-distributors in most tier-1 and tier-2 cities. Corsair India representatives interact directly with both levels of the channel to offer technical support and education due to the nature of the high-end products and target gaming consumer.
At the retail level, we select only premium partners focused on selling value-added gaming solutions.
What would be your focal point for India strategy?
Corsair is positioned now to take advantage of the explosive growth expected in coming years in the India PC gaming market. If you look at other developing markets such as China or SE Asia, then we are confident that India will take off too. It is a matter of getting the sales and support infrastructure in place now. We implemented a 5-day TAT policy that totally boosted channel confidence in Corsair. We are also carrying ready warranty stock of even the highest DDR3 memory and 1000W PSUs.
Please take us through the latest trends in DRAM market? And how’s India responding to global trends?
Without doubt, the most exciting recent development has been the rapid transition to DDR3 at the mid to high end of the PC market. Even in India we are now seeing increasing DDR3 memory demand and our distributors are now carrying ready stock at all times.
This transition to DDR3 is expected to accelerate even quicker with the launch of Intel’s new Corei5 platform in September. Whereas Intel’s present Corei7 DDR3 based platform is aimed at the high-end, Corei5 will be targeted at the mainstream.
Another trend that is taking off in markets like USA and Europe is SSD sales. We are yet to see India adopting to SSD although they are available through Corsair’s India distributors now. PC enthusiasts and gamers are attracted to SSD’s because there are no moving parts so they are not prone to crashing and dying like traditional hard drives. SSD read and write speeds are also considerably faster than HDDs so users see a very noticeable PC performance increases when starting up Microsoft Windows and performing data intensive tasks. The only downside now to SSD adoption is the high cost over hard drives but we are confident this price delta will come down over the next few years.