How best do I make a prediction on the products entering the market in six months? Start with what transpired at Computex 2005, Taiwan.
The five-day event was in its 25th year, and not surprisingly drew record participants and visitors. Around 1,300 exhibitors are reported to have taken up 2,800 booths showcasing their wares to around 27,000 visitors. The Indian contingent too was sizeable, some say bigger than earlier years, and we will certainly see a few distribution deals being finalized/shipments starting in the coming weeks.
But if the 2004 version of Asia’s biggest technology event was about wireless, this year round it was about smaller size. Some of the 22 winners of the Best Choice Awards were those who are already present in this country. All were small form factor products – Gigabyte’s W511A and Asus V6000V notebooks, Shuttle XPC SN25P, Asus A636 GPS PDA, Benq’s CM3500 MFD and the Joybee 200.
There was also a report on the “world’s smallest PC” being launched during the event, by Taiwanese company Saint Song. The Latte Genie PC runs on Intel Pentium 4 and measures 8.3 inches to 6.6 inches to 2.7 inches. The PC reportedly comes with USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, memory card reader and PCMCIA slots. The company said it was ideal for retail and Soho setups and for gamers and home-theater enthusiasts.
More important for the local market here are the lesser-known brands and their innovative products: A cardbus that lets users watch analog TV and record digital TV from Animation Technologies, a wireless multimedia presentation system from Awind, an 80-GB hard disk-based media player from Power Quotient. One distributor spoke of Bluetooth taking prime space, what with Bluetooth now enabling wireless access up to 100 meters (from 30 till some time back), Bluetooth printer adaptors, TV tuners. Another Delhi-based distributor spoke of hard disk (5GB) pen drives and optical zoom products.
As long as the non-branded vendors can provide good pricing (25-30 percent discount) for products of similar quality and target the right customer space, economies of scale will tilt toward them.
One other thing that such vendors should worry about is undervaluing the Indian market. As Delhi’s Vinay Kedia of Shree Sagarmatha says, “Here people are not updated on time of the new techonologies and vendors use the Indian market for mass selling of their products. The common perception among vendors is that the Indian market is price-concious and not quality-concious unlike European markets in spite of being more prospective in terms of revenue. So vendors dump their old stocks which has already been selling in other markets.”