Taiwanese PC maker Acer recently beat HP to reach the No 1 slot in the desktop segment. The company attributes its success to the large wins they got in the enterprise segment, which accounts for 50 per cent of the company's revenue.
“They continued to make inroads in large government and education projects like SSA; they also witnessed a good traction in BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance),” Mr Kiran Kumar, Senior Market Analyst – PC at IDC, told Business Line .
According to IDC numbers, Acer has a 10.7 per cent share of the desktop market, a percentage point more than the No 2 player - HP.
“Till recently, the difference was a sliver, but this time the difference was larger, due to the large commercial deals,” Mr S. Rajendran, Chief Marketing Office of Acer India, said.
According to Mr Rajendran, the company's success rides on strong after-sales support team and the ‘indirect' channel to sell products. “Also, our business model of going the rate-contract route with corporates gives us an edge,” he added. In this route the prices of products are fixed in advance but are delivered in phases.
Commercial segment
According to IDC's Mr Kumar, commercial segment is expected to drive and dominate the desktop PC market in the near future. Already in desktop PC market, the share of the commercial segment is about 70 per cent while the balance is the shrinking consumer segment.
“While people still say that the desktop market is declining, looking at the headroom for growth, we feel it will have a lot of relevance on a continued basis at least for the next two years,” Mr Rajendran said. Acer expects demand for desktop PCs to come from the Government's computerisation drive, education institutes, and programmes such as Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan. “Even in the corporate space, except for IT companies, notebooks have not penetrated to the user front. Desktops cannot be written off too soon,” Mr Rajendran emphasises.
The company is also not losing sleep over the proliferation of other computing devices such as tablets and ultrabooks. “It is not that people have gone through a cycle of computing and are jumping on the bandwagon for notebooks. Beyond the top 50 towns, it is the first time user, and it is for home use on a sharing basis,” said Mr Rajendran.
While the company wants to stay fastened to the commercial space, it is also working a range of programmes to increase its presence in the consumer segment. The Acer Outreach programme started last year is one such initiative. Under the programme, Acer identifies stores in smaller cities that can sell IT products and invests in them by way of in-shop merchandise branding like the shelves, posters on walls or displays.
“We also have Acer Associates who are in charge of certain clusters of towns. They meet the towns once a fortnight and work a supply chain,” Mr Rajendran said.
Acer has also introduced another element in the supply chain called Master Reseller who comes between the dealer and distributor.