At a time when the Indian market is booming with IT acti-vity, Sybase — a
global provider of database technology for enterprises is 'overcharging' its
set of Indian customers by over 30 percent when compared to the global price
list on its website.
According to the company's website, the price of one of its most popular
products — Powerbuilder enterprise edition is Rs 1,37,000 charged globally.
Interestingly, the same product is available thr-ough its distributor Redington
India, at around Rs 1,80,000 within the Indian region. The price difference
comes to be around 30 percent.
“We have different pricing policies for different geog-raphies. It is not
only India, but countries like China and Japan where there is a price
diffe-rence of 80 percent and 90 per-cent respectively,” informed Kumar Mitra,
Head - Channels, Sybase India.
When asked to give a reason to this disparity, Mitra explained that it is
because of 'certain level of locali-zation and tax policies by the government
of India' that the company has to go for an increased pricing policy. “We
have to do a lot of locali-zation for our products. Also there are some taxing
issues involved with selling our products, so all this contri-butes towards
increasing the price according to this geography,” he added.
After having been forced to sell Sybase products at an increased price, the
channel community is feeling cheated by the company. “This is not good for the
overall industry. We might not say it, but the fact is that we are cheating our
end-customers by overcharg-ing them,” adds a New Delhi-based software reseller
on condition of anonymity.
It is interesting to note that it was only after January 1, 2006, that Sybase
has further increased its pricing policy. “We review our pricing policy
regularly and we have inc-reased the Indian pricing by 30 percent after the
January review. Earlier it was 10 percent,” Mitra informed.
Moving beyond the issue of increased price points, according to Redington
India Sybase is loosing its existing customer base due to lack of support and
technical exp-ertise in the market. “I don't think that pricing is a big
issue. There are times when we sell our products at a discount. Customers do
want discounts, so we give them these discounts on the list price. However,
there are certain areas like service and support where the company needs to work
a lot,” added a source from Redington.
Zia Askari New Delhi, June 30