Jamshedpur : Falling from grace

One can very well understand what happens to a market which caters to a single industrial honcho when the later starts modifying its policies or starts relocating tenders.

India's Steel city, Jamshedpur, whose very existence depends on the Tata group of companies, has been off late suffering a similar fate as Tata Steel Ltd (TSL) has started lessening its commissions for the system integrators and making the tendering policy centralised in Mumbai.

So far, channel partners in Jamshedpur stated that 80% of the market survives on projects and supplies to TSL and the recent modifications as well as delayed purchases from TSL and the ancillary industries, primarily due to the market slowdown has cost the IT partners in the city much.

In The DQ Week Tech Caravan episode in Jamshedpur, held on August 23, the city went into an uproar against a phenomenon they could not control besides highlighting other key issues.

According to the majority of the attendees in the event, the ongoing economic slaughter is the prime culprit for the market shrinking by over 16% YoY. As such, the market depends heavily on TSL and the corporate segment, which is postponing its purchases and delaying or cutting off its deployments as a measure to shrink its IT budget in times of an economic crisis.

"The key factor (for the market degrowth) is that we have lost enough business from the corporate segment over the years and it is now at a critical stage. The financial crisis and the rising USD are the main reasons for the crisis but it is something which we cannot control", said Abhay Upadhay of Om Computer World.

The channel community is the city mainly comprise of the system integrators and suppliers with the distribution segment nearly absent; even HP doesn't have a sub-distributor in place as no channel partner is ready to step-in.

"Jamshedpur thoroughly lacks a proper distributor segment as no channel partner is ready to burn his hands into it", said Abhijeet Mukherjee of Tirupati Teletech.

Unique to the city, the supply chain works in a dual mode; a direct supply to the resellers and system integrators from the national distributors and billings from Kolkata which is majorly cash driven. Further, cases of cheating and duping from defunct companies have been very vocal.

"Partners here prefer to purchase material from distributors in Kolkata rather than opt for the segment themselves. They do get discounts over the purchase as it is cash driven but it actually harms the market momentum", said a delegate in the event wishing not to be quoted.

Anger against the vendors for non-availability of service is also a concern here and there seems to be no respite against the fury in the near future.

As the power-packed discussion over the market came to its end, The DQ Week left Jamshedpur with the assurance of addressing each of its ailments in the near future.

The sponsors of the event were Symantec, Western Digital and Uniline.