AMD appoints 2 new master resellers

Asim Raina & Shweta Sharma

With aggressive marketing strategies in place and road shows across the country in nine cities, Advance Micro Devices (AMD) has appointed two new master resellers-Mumbai based Priya Ltd and Delhi based Cyberstar Infocom-to make its inventory readily available across the country.

According to Sanjeev Keskar, Country Manager, AMD India, "Impetus is on building loyal channel partners across the nation. AMD is a price performance product, its USP needs to be leveraged enough across the market. And we are looking forward to have such kind of channel partners." To provide the required push in the market, AMD will aggressively go in for registering a bigger number of active resellers to its present list of 1,000 odd resellers across the nation.

At present AMD has six master resellers--Great World, Zeta, Priya, Abacus, Mediaman (all from Mumbai) and Cyberstar in Delhi. To provide its master resellers better profitability, it is now recommending all of them to stock their inventories on a weekly basis, unlike the previous practice of stocking monthly inventories. This will protect them from frequent price fluctuations and also immune them from paying a 20 percent duty on inflated prices.

Keskar said that south and east India are the biggest market for AMD and the company would like to propel more of its presence there. Very aggressive with its educative advertising campaigns, AMD is targeting every segment. It will also soon be in process of talking to various OEMs to provide AMD chips in their PC brands.

On the lines of educating the consumer, it is opening the first of its kind AMD Centers at three locations across the country--Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. At present, it has 13 Athlon Centers all over India, which are also slated to undergo a change. The three new centers would be exclusive ones where an end consumer can evaluate and get first hand experience of an AMD machine. Keskar is looking for interested partners to open such centers.

AMD is also revamping its present reseller reward scheme which so far has been a completely Web based scheme. Under the old scheme resellers could register and keep track of schemes on by being online. But now, the company aims to bring more flexibility by offering the reseller the option of offline also. In addition, rewards are also being revamped to make it more attractive to resellers. As Keskar puts it, "The focus is on creating loyal partners."

Meanwhile, AMD is also a gold partner with Microsoft for the soon to be launched Windows XP. It will be present in all the seven road shows that will be organized by Microsoft over the next one month.

With its financial year ending in December, Keskar is bullish on the Indian market and the future outlook. He expects to open two more offices at Bangalore and Mumbai early next year, besides adding more manpower to its current tally of five.

(CNS)