Gigabyte downsizes its tier-1 partner by 20%

Gigabyte has been undergoing consolidation of its its premium partners. Beginning Q1, 2012, the company started cutting down the size of its tier-1 partners from 140 to 92, almost 20% decrease. Besides churning out the premium partners, the other focus area for the motherboard manufacturer is to strengthen its after-sales support and across the table policy for faster turnaround time of the motherboard. After opening a service support hub in Kochi, Ahmadabad and Kolkata, the company has opened its fourth state-of-the art service support hub in Delhi's Nehru Place.

Speaking to The DQ Week on partners consolidation, Sunil Grewal, director, sales, Gigabyte Technology on the opening ceremony of Delhi service hub, said, "We have been very clear in terms of our channel policy. We intend to work with only loyal premium channel partners. During the churning out exercise, we found some of our tier-1 partners are not loyal to the Gigabyte brand and lack mind share. Therefore, we decided to focus or work with only those partners who are more concerned about the our brand and are comfortable in doing our business. The decision has paid off well, as we have increased our sales to 60,000 per month over the last few quarters, with the new change. Moreover, our channel profitability and confidence has increased multi-fold."

The company claims to have 30% connect into CPU sales in last quarter. The downsize of the channel took place across India, in Mumbai, the company has cut down its channel from 6-7 partner, to 2. As per the new policy, the company would work with only those channel partners who do not carry competitive products in their portfolio and are committed to Gigabyte brand.

Grewal also added, "Although we are very selective for our tier-2 partners at the same time we are expanding our tier-2 channel base. Currently, the company has more than 3,000 resellers in India."

Talking about the after-sales support, he said, "The new replacement center in Nehru Place has capability to handle same day replacement to our customers. These new service support center hub are jointly managed by Gigabyte and Accel Frontline, an exclusive service provider for Gigabyte. We will be opening our two new hub in Hyderabad and Mumbai very shortly. Some of our hubs have facility to handle chip level repair."

The Nehru Place is spread across 1,700 sq ft space, in addition to faster replacement and repair, the office will have adequate supply of buffer stock to facilitate across the table replacement.

Grewal further added, "The new office aligns with the company's India growth strategy. Our headquartered team aim is to provide best experience to the Indian customers and hence we want our after-sales support team to match with the efficiency of our Taiwan technical team. Hence each service hub will have Taiwan engineers to support the local back-end team."

The new service hub will work in tandem with existing 30 special service partners over 30 Accel Care Center and 24 ATRs across India.