Business worth Rs 1.5 crore generated in SITA

South Gujarat Information Technologists Association (SITA) held a theme

exhibition, specifically focusing on mobility, especially laptops in Surat, from

Sep 24-26, 2004. "The idea behind this exhibition was to increase the

business of laptops, and pro-mote awareness of laptops in Surat and south

Gujarat," said Chetan Shah, ex-President of SITA, and current Secretary

Ge-neral, NACIT. Besides, laptops are in vogue the most these days," he

added.

The exhibition was inaugu-rated by G R Aloria, Commissi-oner, Surat Municipal

Corp. It had participants from various companies, some of which were IBM, Compaq

and Zenith, Acer, iBall from the Indian market. "Generally exhibitions have

a combination of various products like servers and peripherals, but here people

were not ready to accept that an exhibition was held for one particular product,

because of which we could give quality time to the customers," said Dates

Daruwala, who represen-ted IBM. The business conver-sion on the exhibition venue

had been very encouraging.

25 laptops being sold from the venue itself. "With 225 hot leads being

generated, and 25 laptops being sold, business worth Rs 1.5 crore is expected to

be done from the exhibi-tion," remarked Chetan.

The main focus of the exhibi-tion was on Wi-Fi. A Wi-Fi zone was created,

which had Wi-Fi connectivity and the partici-pants could freely connect to the

internet from there. The other focus was on computing power and how they have

emerged to be real companions to people. "We also focused on weight of

laptops, and how they are more user-friendly on being light in weight and easy

to carry too," added Chetan.

Another feature of the exhi-bition was the customers who came to see the

exhibition.

"The customers were speci-fically looking at purchasing laptops,

finalising the deal that day itself and also looking at the right

configuration," said Hiten Shah, President, SITA, and who was representing

Mercury and iball.

An advantage of this exhibition was the venue, Holiday Inn. "The venue

was very attractive and customers were not walking in with an aim to just

collect broch-ures," said Datesh, who also closed deals for 8-9 laptops in

the exhibition.

Amishi Shah


Mumbai