Interviews

ADATA India Pledges To Improve TAT

Adata Technology
Richard Tan
Managing Director, Adata Technology

Memory products player ADATA is all set to crack the Indian market and proposes to use the festival season to garner a head start. With the company introducing channel plans, Richard Tan, MD, ADATA Technology India, shares with Channel Times, the channel policies and yet-to-come offers. Excerpts from the interview:

Q: Can you give us some pointers about the company’s channel structure?

Richard: ADATA India has a multi-tier channel structure wherein we have both National and Regional distributors setup. We have three national distributors – Rashi and Compuage for DRAM, and Technocrat Infotech based out of Kolkata is one of our partners for the entire range of products. Then for our UFDs, External HDDs, SSDs we have Creative Peripherals and Savera Marketing, who, with their local strengths and strong regional presence, help each the tier-2 and tier- 3 partners in more than 200 towns and cities. We are currently looking for another distributor in the south of India.

Q: How many channel partners do you have in India?

Richard: We have more than 400 regular partners working with us through our two-tier loyalty partner program wherein the top of the line partners are known as Gladiators and the tier-2 partners are known as Warriors. We work closely in incentivizing them, providing back-ends schemes and other marketing benefits over the past three quarters and have seen a gradual growth in the number of new enrollments.

Q: How channel-friendly is your company compared to others?

Richard: ADATA in India works solely with its authorized channel partners and provide support to them to create awareness about the brand and provide all the necessary support in terms of marketing, back-ends, collaterals etc. We provide all the necessary support required in terms of after sales support, branding, merchandising etc to them from time to time.

Q: In memory products, the biggest issue is the post-sales and service support. How much effort is ADATA taking especially on post-sales support?

Richard: We recently tied up with F1 Services for post-sales service requirements besides which they provide buffer stocks for our fast moving products to our national and regional distributors so as to help our partners get immediate replacement for ADATA range Pen drives and flash cards. For External HDDs we are working closely with F1 to improve on out Turn Around Time (TAT) from the existing 7-10 days to 3 days by the year end.

Q: Which are the states in India that you’re seeking distributors/dealers?

Richard: This is a continuous process for any dynamic business to keep aligning for our distributors/partners in varying geographies. Over the past year we have realigned our business to be more proactive and one that acts and reacts to market dynamics quickly and effectively and that has helped us reap huge benefits in terms of both the business and getting the brand the necessary pull required from customers side and thus helping partners get more confidence on the brand.

Q: What are the plans you have for your channels in the coming days?

Richard: We plan to continue with our loyalty program and get more partners enrolled. We also plan to create brand pull amongst the end customers through various online and offline mode of communications. With the onset of festive season – we have rolled out a point based channel incentive scheme for our partners wherein apart from the white goods they get on achieving the numbers, a few selected ones who achieve the top of points slab will get a chance to fly to a fully paid trip Bangkok.

Q: One common feedback from channels on your product is that channel-awareness of ADATA is very low compared to other brands. How will you address this issue?

Richard: This can be said to be partially correct. As many end-customers are not aware on the brand, but in terms of channel awareness the situation is far better as in the last one and a half years we have done consistently well and have seen our business growing quarter-on-quarter. We are working on various plans as of now and will soon share these.

Q: What aspects do you consider while creating a scheme and how often do you think they should be launched?

Richard: Channel schemes are an integral part of any IT company and ADATA with its years of experience has very well understood the same. Smaller schemes based on regional requirements are run from time-to-time depending upon the marketing dynamics. Diwali season is the period wherein a scheme of national level and is being very well accepted amongst channel partners.

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