Adobe's unrealistic India pricing creates unrest among partners

The company is also asking its reseller community to sell products above the estimated street price thus cheating the end-user community

There is a growing dissent among the software channel community towards global software major – Adobe's fraudulent pricing policy for its India operations. The company is selling its products at a higher price when compared to the Adobe website listed price - of same products globally. Surprisingly, the difference is coming out to be more than 30 percent and in some cases even higher.

Fanned by this upsetting policy – many channel partners engaged in selling software are voicing their concern towards this and are asking Adobe to rationalize its approach towards pricing its products in India, before its too late.

Macromedia products added to the list
Close on the heels after acquiring Macromedia – Adobe has added Macro­media products to the list of highly priced products for its Indian operations as well. For instance, the company is offering Adobe Macromedia Studio 8.0 for a price of US$ 800 in the US, however same product is steeply priced at US$ 1,040 within India – the difference works out to be 30 percent.

Similar pricing is offered for Adobe Macromedia Flash 8.0 Pro-USA price: US$ 560 while its Indian price is US$ 730  - difference again of 30 percent. However, when contacted Sandeep Mehrotra, Country Sales Manager, Adobe Systems India Pvt Ltd did not have much to say apart from trying to avoid the whole issue and blaming the shipping charges for this.

When probed a bit further, it was brought to the knowledge of DQ Week that the overall shipping charges on these products are not coming beyond Rs 100 to Rs 300 per software pack figure. Hence the company does not hold any rationale behind selling products at a higher price in India.

“These shipping charges cannot be more than Rs 100 to Rs 200. I don't seem to understand the rationale behind this. This is pure black marketing by Abode and it should not be tolerated at any cost. I sincerely believe that the people responsible for this should be exposed,” said a prominent New Delhi-based reseller.

Similar voices can be heard from other places as well. A lot of resellers believe that Adobe's product pricing in India have been varying wildly since the last 10 years.

“They seem to have grown five times since 1998 where the channel partners have grown 10 times in the same period by latching on to com­peting products and organi­zations,” added one software reseller from Mumbai.

As if this was not enough – Adobe is specifically asking its reseller community to sell its product above its estimated street price (ESP). “They have gone to the extent of dictating such terms to us now. They are saying that we cannot sell Adobe's product below ESP, which is being defined by Adobe itself. Rather we are being told to sell above the ESP. Their communication to us clearly says that 'End user copy is required for order processing' – I don't think that this is going to help the end user community or even the company's Indian operations by any means,” informs, a visibly upset reseller from Delhi.   

Many still believe that Adobe's Indian revenue can double in one year if the price is reduced by 50 percent and the onus of taking the risk lies with Adobe and its Indian team. “Whether it is the company or the distributor, that is manipulating the Indian prices factor, should be dealt with appropriately otherwise the company will loose its reputation,” added a prominent Kolkata-based software reseller.

“The software industry (packaged) has to be twice the size of the hardware industry where as we are barely 10 percent of the revenue of the IT industry just because the price of software is more than the hardware and the support has to come from the vendor by lowering prices and the government by strict compliance as has happened in Singapore recently,” Mumbai's reseller added.

Zia Askari New Delhi, Feb 3