Market confused over authentic Simmtronics distributor

Supercom Memories which claims to be the only national distribu-tor for
Simmtronics, has been accused of using the fake identity of a company, which
closed down sometime back, by another company Silicon Impex that claims
Simmtronics is now their trademark. On the other hand Supercom denied the
charges as ‘baseless’.

"Ten years ago both Super-com and Silicon were the distis for the
Simmtronics range of memories and imported the products from the US. But a few
years back Simmtronics closed down its shutters and it was then that we took the
trade-mark and copyright of the company," pointed out Ashish Singhal,
Manager (Marketing), Silicon Impex. "After that we started importing the
products from Taiwan and China and also informed our customers about the product
and didn’t keep anyone in the dark. We are a totally transparent
company."

He also accused Supercom of claiming that the products are from US while in
reality they are being brought from Taiwan and China markets. "In one case
they used the picture of one of our product in their marketing campaign but sold
some other cheap product," charged Singhal.

When contacted, Indrajit Sabharwal, Director, Supercom Memories, retorted,
"These allegations are totally baseless. Silicon is basically a duplicator.
Earlier, it used to duplicate Epson products but after the company filed a case
on them they stopped it. As it is, Simm-tronics Memories comes with chipsets,
which if these people start to manufacture will cost them around Rs 10 crore."

He further claimed to have got the ‘R’ trademark registered while the
Silicon just has the TM. "There also was a case reg-arding this issue which
we won and were granted this two ye-ars ago," he remarked. He also
categorically stated that their products come from US only and that the company
still exists, while Silicon claims that the company was shelved long time back.

Meanwhile, Supercom is becoming a private company and will be renamed
Simm-tronics Semiconductors Pvt Ltd, revealed Sabharwal.

But one interesting thing to note is that apart from Super-com none of the
listed distribu-tors–Bluecom Danmark A/S, Epoch Sales in CA, GBM Distri-butors
in Dubai and Colorado Digitek in Mexico–on the Sim-mtronics site (www.simmtro-nics.com)
is dealing with this company. Another thing to be pointed out is that for Libya
and Riyadh the addresses given were that of GBM Distributors of Dubai. While on
its site it was nowhere mentioned that it had an office in these two cities.
While the mud slinging goes on, the market is in a fix as to who is the original
Simmtronics distributor.

Karma Negi

New Delhi