Apple to open its first retail outlet in India in Mumbai

Apple Computers, which had been exploring the possibility of opening its
retail outlets in India for quite some time, is all set to turn that possibility
into a reality by opening its first retail outlet at Mumbai sometime in October.
The company is holding talks with some of its partners with whom the company
plans to open its retail outlet at Mumbai.

After gauging the performance of its Mumbai retail outlet, the company is
also planning to roll many more of them in India. Apple’s Mumbai retail outlet
would in all possibilities be on the line of Apple’s retail outlets in
Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

In Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia Apple markets its products through its
Apple Centers, which are run by general businessmen, who are trained by Apple
computers to run the Apple centers. These businessmen are given training by
Apple so that they are able to successfully and efficiently explain to the
buyers about the respective Apple products and hence successfully boost product
sales. Albert Lam, MD (South Asia) disclosed this.

The company is also planning to target the enterprise segment more
aggressively in India and is looking for new channel partners to make deeper
inroads into this segment. Till now the company was primarily focusing on the
education segment in India.

“One hears about the enterprises in a big way and they have grown
tremendously and so we want to leverage on this growth for which we are looking
for more channel partners to tap the enterprise market. We are in the process of
striking major deals with many enterprises in India shortly. We also plan to add
on many more channel partners to capitalize on the growing enterprise segment in
India with our products,” said Lam.

“We have launched X serve 1U Rack-Mount Unix based server in India with
which we would be able to target the higher education segment, mainstream
enterprise markets and the video space markets in the country successfully. The
server's unique combination for file and print service, render farm, video
streaming, database applications, computational clustering along with Web and
mail serving will help us enter fresh markets,” remarked Lam.

Lan also informed that Apple also plans to enter the enterprise segment in a
big way with its recently launched MAC OS X version 10.2 OS under the Unix hood
in India. Lan said that the new features of this product include mail
applications which involve i-chat and instant messenger and it is also equipped
with Quick Time, Apple’s trade mark software. The new OS also includes Shelock
search engines.

“India is a tremendous growth market for Apple products and we have hired
enthusiastic professionals to streamline our operations in the country and we
hope to grow further here,” added Lam.

Abhinav Singh

(CNS)