Kobian drops Advantage; Advantage refutes, says it discontinued Kobain

Kobian India has announced its decision to withdraw the entire range of Mercury products from Advantage Computers. The withdrawn products include motherboards, modems, CD-ROM drives, speakers, keyboards and mouse among others. Kobian took this decision since Advantage had launched similar product range under their brand name 'Adcom'. According to Kobian, the co-existence of two products addressing the same market segment will reflect on the market reach and volume sales of the Mercury brand.

Said Sunil Sharma, MD, Kobian India Pvt Ltd, "As a policy we do not have Mercury products co-existing with the brands launched by the distributor, though it would be comfortable if our distributors deal with two brands of different vendors and not their own." This step from Kobian makes Advantage the second to be withdrawn from distributorship, first being
Compuage.

Meanwhile, Kobian has appointed SES Technologies as a distributor along with Neoteric, Visualan, Wellwin, Supertron and Savex. Kobian feels that SES Technologies has a higher scope of growth as it has a presence in 23 cities across the country. "SES Technologies is the second largest Intel distributor and we feel that the company is an ideal choice to distribute Mercury motherboards to its existing channel," said Sharma.

On the other hand, Advantage Computers refuted the charges. As per Sanjeev Bhatia, MD, Advantage Computers, "It is a wise decision in interest of our reputation to discontinue our relations with Kobain. So far we have not been able to gather much through this brand, especially because of its service policies and channel incentive plans. I don't think any one can do business with false commitments and policies with respect to support and quality," added
Bhatia.

As per Bhatia, when Advantage was distributing Mercury, it had to compromise on the business, as both were never able to satisfy the various service issues and they being the distributors, always had a handicap in the absence of support from the principal company. Commenting on the Adcom brand, Bhatia sounded resolute on its new brand as he boasted that the brand is slowly creating its impact in the market.