CT: How has TP-LINK’s global performance been in recent years?
Jason: As you know, we’re a networking products company headquartered in Shenzhen (China) with a focus on WLAN products. Since our founding in 1996, we’ve committed to intensive R&D and quality management aiming to provide high performance, quality and value to SOHO networking products all across the world. TP-LINK today boasts of 29 overseas offices selling in 120 countries. We collaborate with 400 distributors worldwide to sell over 100 million units annually. IDC estimates our marketshare to be at 42.6% in Q1 of 2013, the 13th consecutive quarter that we’ve led at the top.
CT: How favorable is the Indian market conditions?
Jason: As a big nation and a large market where we see rapid growth, India occupies an important position in TP-LINK’s global strategy. We established our India subsidiary in 2010, focusing on the supply of high quality, high value and reliable networking products to the end-users. While we began from zero, we are growing very fast. We look forward to an increase of 80% by the end of this year, which is very inspiring. This rapid growth would not be possible without the support of all of our business partners and end-users. Without their support and trust, we couldn’t have achieved such impressive success.
CT: What are the top five factors that helped your brand in networking race?
Jason:TP-LINK’s remarkable global presence is a result of several aspects of what drives our company. I think this can be of professional research and development, highly-qualified suppliers, powerful manufacturing plants, innovations in products, and not to miss, the field force-experienced sales and marketing Team
CT: What are the Indian market challenges you faced?
Jason: The Indian market shows great potential, as well as challenges. For example, the depreciation of the Rupee is being used as an opportunity by local Indian export-oriented enterprises, while to us who focus on importing; this is quite a big challenge. To ensure the stability of our MSRP, we have taken several of measures to reduce our operation and logistic costs, meanwhile we flattened our channel and reduced the cost of sales, which has led us through the shock.
Secondly, India has a vast territory and a large population, which has been an obstacle for us to promote the Flattening Strategy. We made an effort to improve our coverage in the channel. At present we have already established cooperative relationships with over 60 regional distributors in all major cities. However, there are also a lot of vacant regions in B and C class cities remaining to be developed.
How close are you connected with your customers?
Jason: TP-LINK has always been striving to provide our end users with a high quality product experience, and have achieved remarkable success in that. That said, there have been certain circumstances wherein our products have not lived up to our own standards and the demands of our customers. We recently received some feedback on our TD-W8951ND product. As soon as we were informed about this situation, we arranged very strict tests based on the real application environment in our laboratory. We came to know the chips in some of the products that came from a certain shipment are over-sensitive. After our communication with the chipset supplier, they have improved their production process. The chips in the new shipments no longer have this problem. For defective products that are still circulating in the Indian market, TP-LINK offers a free replacement warranty. If users face this problem, they can contact us in 1800 2094 168.
CT: What is your market strategy in India? What are your future plans?
Jason: India is an emerging market with high potential, to which TP-LINK holds very high expectations. In the aspect of marketing, with reference to advanced experience from some mature markets such as USA and UK, and also the understanding of the Indian culture by our local team, we are able to deploy scientific and detailed marketing strategies. With regard to our products, we won’t change our attitude of serving customers with high quality yet affordable products and friendly user experiences. From a channel perspective, we aim to build win-win relationships and create value for our partners. We have achieved very good results through a series of effective measures. In the future we will go on with our strategy and carry it out thoroughly.