Acer India announces foray into retail distribution

Acer India has announ-ced its entry into the retail market. The com-pany

announced the opening of the first of its retail stores across the country.

According to the company release, by the end of January 2004, it plans to have

50 Acer Malls and Acer Point stores in all at various locations including

Coimbatore, Lucknow, Cochin, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Pune, Bangalore,

Hyderabad and the four metros.

The company release further stated that, every Acer store will carry the

Aspire series of consumer PCs and the Travel-Mate notebook series. Retailers

will have a choice in displaying other Acer categories such as TFT monitors,

projectors and other multi-functional personal devices. The Acer Malls will also

be the preferred retail distri-butors for the recently launched Acer Ferrari

3000 notebook.

Acer’s retail stores will fall into three categories. The first will be the

full shop or ‘Acer Mall’ which will comprise of Acer products and

non-competing products. In the second cate-gory, one section of the store will

display Acer products and in the third category, one corner of the store will

exhibit Acer products. The second and third category stores will be known as ‘Acer

Points’. Acer will provide the storeowners with branding and visual

merchan-dising for the stores in the form of standees, banners and external and

internal signage.

In addition, Acer has also engaged the services of a prof-essional retail

design company, Prime Site (a division of Mudra Communications Pvt Ltd), to

provide uniform branding and merchandising across the sto-res. Acer will also

train store sales executives at every retail outlet under its Acer Certified

Sales Professional (ACSP) program.

"Acer has always been at the forefront of offering consumers innovative

quality products at competitive prices. Our retail incentives to our partners

are compelling and attractive and we expect to triple the number of stores by

the end of 2004," said S Rajendran, GM (Sales and Marketing–Consumer

Product Group), Acer India.

Acer will collaborate with its existing partners, who have the location

primacy advantage, market share and acceptability in their market region for the

remaining stores.

CyberMedia News Service


Bangalore