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one of the global leaders in design, development and
manufacture of wired and wireless networking, storage and memory
solutions, is looking at penetrating the Indian market aggressively
with its wireless LAN, USB hard drives, and NAS products.
Satoshi Inaba, Assistant GM-APAC, Buffalo Technology, “We have
more categories in Japan. In case of India, we have tried to focus on
the categories which we feel is sale-able in the Indian market. With
these three categories only, we are focusing on creating more
opportunities for us to penetrate in the Indian market.”
The company believes that India is one of the growing markets in the
APAC region and there is huge chunk of young population whom it can
target. The young generation understands the technology better and
has a totally different approach. The company follows a practice,
wherein it tries to understand end users' opinion and psyche, and
communicate the same to its engineering team.
In its last four years of presence in India, the company has
witnessed slow and limited growth of its products. While Supertron
Electronics, who is the ND, has supported the company well in all
these years, the company still feels that it has failed to cover some
of the areas. Even a few resellers were not happy and satisfied with
some of the company's products.
And this is the reason why it has recently signed up Ingram Micro as
its second ND for India. With Ingram Micro, the company is now trying
to promote its NAS products and target the enterprise segment,
universities and hospitals amongst other segments.
“
Micro has an extensive partner network.
channels
mean deep penetration of
products in the Indian market and this would in turn ensure more and
more end-users buying our products. We want 'one plus one to become
three' and that's the kind of synergy we are looking forward to with
this partnership,” added Inaba.
Buffalo considers a strong channel network that will help in
successful implementation of an effective marketing strategy in the
Indian market. But at the same time, one has to have right partners
in place. The company recognizes the need to reward its partners and
is confident that various channel schemes will act as a tool for
motivation, since the resellers and channel partners have always been
an integral part of its business.
Inaba pointed out, “As a vendor organization, we need to keep
pushing our customers and make them understand what all product
offerings we have in place and how it is different from the ones
available in the market. We need to create some kind of education
process for our customers and for this we have to keep creating
unique products and solutions for the Indian market.”
In order to spread its message in the Indian market, company is
targeting IT hubs like Nehru Place in Delhi, wherein it is trying to
interact directly with the IT shop owners, get their views on what
customers want, then draw inference from their opinions, and send the
message back to Japan and to its engineering team to create new
concept and products.
“
are looking at shops in IT malls in India. Besides, we are also
looking at targeting shops like Croma and Staples at various cities,”
asserted Inaba.
its expansion spree, the company is also planning to open its own
Buffalo Shop soon, probably by the end of September or early October
at Delhi's IT hub, Nehru Place. It is currently focusing on one shop
this year and after taking around six months time to evaluate their
approach,
starting next year, the company will expand the Buffalo shop concept in
other cities as
well.
Apart from these partnerships, the company is trying to make its
business five times bigger in the next couple of years in the Indian
market. It is also focusing on online business. Nonetheless, it will
soon start imparting product training to its partners on a
periodical/monthly basis-may be one city in a month.