Lenovo laptops being sold with Sahara stickers

New Delhi, July 14

In a bizarre goof-up in executing,
manufacturing and maintaining healthy supply chain activity some Lenovo laptops
in the Indian region were sold in the market with Sahara stickers on them.

The laptops from the L1 series (approximately 50,000 pieces according to
market sources) - from Sahara Computers, which is available with 40GB hard disk,
Celeron 1.4, wireless speakers and 14" screen, looks to be a normal laptop
from Sahara, only to an untrained eye. At a closer inspection one can see that
the laptop has a Sahara sticker behind which it shows that it is a Lenovo
product. 

While Sahara has placed its laptop range at around the Rs 27,000 mark, Lenovo
laptops are being sold in the market at around Rs 38,000. When The DQ Week
brought this issue to the front, different Lenovo resellers from cities like
Allahabad, Lucknow and even Chandigarh came forward to express their concern on
the issue.

“This will create a very bad situation for us. After all customers will go
for a cheaper product and if they can get the same Lenovo product at a cheaper
rate from Sahara than surely we are going to have a difficult time selling a
Lenovo pro-duct,” explained a Lenovo reseller from Allahabad on condition of
anonymity.

However, when contacted Naresh Khosla, VP, Sahara Computers said that the
company is in the process of investigating the case internally and also checking
with the technology partner to understand the reason for this goof-up.

“We were not aware of any such issue before it was raised by The DQ Week.
We are investigating the same internally and checking with the technology
partner to understand the reason. There are only a very small percentage of such
products in the market as far as we are concerned. I don't think a major
percentage of the affected notebooks are in the market, so the reseller
community need not panic,” he added.

How this happened?

Looking at the global scenario, there are five big ODMs (original design
manufacturers), including Taiwan-based BenQ and Asus, meeting the needs of
multinational compa-nies like Sahara or Lenovo. It is only the pressure of
supplying big volumes to MNCs that can sometime translate towards such goof-ups
on the part of the ODM.

“In case of a laptop, these ODMs supply every-thing except for four com-ponents
— HDD, micropro-cessor, memory and the wireless card. In the case of Sahara,
the ODM even supplies the stickers, so it becomes easier for compa-nies like us
to manage everything,” Khosla said.

“We have a tech partner-ship with the best ODMs who also supply to other
top global MNCs and the same confirms the quality and features of our prod-ucts.
Since our business grew very fast we were able to sell more numbers than
forecasted. Thus we had to put pressure on the ODM to ship larger volumes and it
is possible that they have shipped the excess quantities of any other MNC
ven-dor to fulfill our fast growing demand,” Khosla added.

When the going is already quite tough for the resellers in terms of
generating profits, the reseller commu-nity is in a quandary over an important
issue like this. “Whether it is Sahara or Lenovo, both these companies are
quite reputed. A Sahara laptop costs around Rs 27,000 while Lenovo products are
quite costly at around Rs 38,000. Now if a customer is looking at both the
products, which one should he go for? It will be a big issue of concern for
Lenovo resellers like us,” informed a reseller from Varanasi on condition of
anonymity.