ASUS treats its 'lions' to Singapore, eyes expansion

ASUS recently treated its partners to a lavish trip to the land of the Merlion-Singapore, by organizing the ASUS Giant Lion's Pride Meet from March 15-18, 2013. Around 140 partners came on board for this 4-days long event which was full on fun and frolic.

The trip was a reward to the partners on the successful completion of the partners incentive scheme which was active for 2 months-December 2012-January 2013.

According to Unaez Quraishi, director, sales and distribution, ASUS India the main purpose of the event was to bring all its partners under one roof and treat every partner equally irrespective of the number of sales made by them. He said, "Even if the partner has done a minimum quantity of 75-100 or a larger quantity of 300-500, everybody is eligible and everybody is in the same line. They are all our loyal partners who have been with us since the past 3 years and we wanted to reward them for leading us to success and being a part of the ASUS team."

The forum was also utilized to introduce Peter Chang, country manager, ASUS with the partners and interact with such a huge number of partners elaborately under one roof.

Sharing his vision about the company Chang said, "In the last 2 years we have grown by 3 times. At this stage we need to improvise our strategies in order to grow further. We need to continue with the expansion but want to make the brand more efficient, so the nest phase would be to balance this expansion and efficiency."

Further explaining the channel incentive schemes, Quraishi said, "Prior to this we had loyal partners schemes and now we have simplified the process. We have now only 3 level of partners and accordingly we incentivize them. In tier-2 and 3 we have ASPs (ASUS Silver Partners). We also have ALPs (ASUS Loyal Partners) which are in the A category. We are more focused and need to be more professional in what we are doing now and what have invested in and streamline them."

Quraishi also took the opportunity to educate the partners about its latest tablets and encourage them to take tablets into consideration as till date 70% of the tablets sale is with the company's mobile channels while only 30% is with IT channels.

On the sidelines of the event Quraishi also shared the company's future plans which includes more store openings (200 shops in 2013); frequent advertisement and brand awareness and involving the branch heads in marketing activities and increase the incremental revenues.

ASUS has aggressive plans to add 300+ people this year and improve service support; it is also targeting a 10% notebook share and 15% tablet share in 2013.

(The author was hosted by ASUS in Singapore).