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