Gigabyte to ship 1m mobos in India by Dec 04

Digi Giga Systems, a tie-up between Taiwan-based Gigabyte and D-Link India,
will ship one million motherboards, by the end of December, 2004. Rajan Sharma,
Product Manager (Motherboards), Digi Giga Systems is confident that the company
can touch this milestone. In less than three years since it started operations
Digi Giga has already shipped over 8.5 lakh mobos in India. The company managed
to boost sales of its Gigabyte mobos by coming up with back-to-back channel
schemes.

For the current OND quarter, it is running a scratch-card promotion where
resellers can encash every point that they accumulate on the scratch cards for
gifts. Distributors who sell mobos to resellers will also get points and 50
percent of these points will be reimbursed in gold coins. For example, if a
distributor gathers 10,000 points, he will get gold valued at Rs 5,000.

Another ongoing scheme is where Digi Giga is bundling its Gigabyte AMD mobos
for VIA chipsets with ATI nVidia graphic cards. "Mobos and graphic cards
share a symbiotic relationship, which is why we came up with this
promotion," explained Sharma. Digi Giga will soon bundle its AMD-based
mobos with VGA cards. The reason the company is running several programs
simultane-ously is to ensure that its part-ners win good prizes through one, or
more, schemes. "We are making sure that our entire range is being promoted,
rather than just one product," added Sharma.

Besides mobos and graphic cards, Digi Giga recently introduced optical disk
drives in the Indian market. This will be followed with the launch of other PC
products and com-ponents in the coming fiscal. "We have a whole range of
products, which we want to bring into the country. But before we take the
plunge, we would like to consolidate our brand and channel. We also need to
analyze the demand-ratio for these products and marketing strategy to pit them
against existing brands," said Sharma.

Vinita Bhatia

Mumbai