Philips evolves strategies to conquer Indian market

Philips Sound Solutions (PSS) is evolving out stra-tegies to make a big
splash in the Indian and the Chinese market. According to Hans van’t Riet,
Manager (Audio-Video & Multimedia), Philips, who is in India to study the
Indian audio-video and the multimedia market, the company would work and re-work
on its product, pricing and promotion factors.

The PSS team, which is still studying the market, declined to give a clear
picture as to their strategies, which it would be evolving shortly. But in the
pro-duct category, it has decided upon launching one model per month in
audio-video and mul-timedia.

India and China markets are different from Europe and US, remarked Riet, for
these mar-kets use the same speaker sys-tem for PC and DVD. Secondly, the way
things sold here is totally different. "Here you have different players
like the distri-butors and the dealers for sell-ing a product. We have to
under-stand what each player requires in order to be successful. So we are in
talk with the dealers cur-rently," he said. PSS proposes to make it
presence felt in each and every city of India through its national distributor
Priya.

Accordingly, it plans to exp-and its network by appointing one dealer per
district in every state. If in Europe and US, PSS has to compete with just few
big brands the scenario is com-pletely different in India, where the market is
flooded with local and Chinese brands. So accor-ding to the company’s third
strategy, it will be reworking on the pricing factor.

"But this doesn’t mean that we will be reducing the prices just to
meet the competition. Though we have already done some corrections in the
pricing in February, by making a redu-ction of about 10-15 percent," added
Piyush Sheth, Manager (Marketing & Sales), PSS India.

In the products category, besides launching unique sound systems, PSS will
also launch consumer electronic products like the home theaters, which it
believes will be more powerful when compared to the PC. "We will be
introducing consumer electronic products with convergence of various other
technologies and mediums," said Riet.

Nisha Kurian

Chennai (CyberMedia News)