UPCDA conducts meeting with HP and DELL

Lucknow

Either connivance or inaction of vendors is increasingly leading to huge losses of IT dealers. Like all associations fighting the issue UPCDA stepped further and recently met concerned authorities of Dell and HP on 7 Dec 2014 at Hotel Lavana, Hazratganj, Lucknow.

Representing Dell were Manish Gupta, director sales; Rajat Mehrotra and Rahul Sarin ASM. HP was represented by Ketan Patel, director; Anurag Arora NSM; Nitish Singhal ZSM and P.K.Singh, RSM.

Rohit Kohli, president, UPCDA welcomed dignitaries and explained the pain areas highlighting the plight of dealer community.  Devesh Rastogi, chairman, Vendor Coordination Committee took it forward by citing examples of Chroma where Dell vostro i3 was priced at Rs 27000 but was available at Rs. 31000 in the open market. He then asked the Dell team to issue a statement before the charter of demands was presented to them.

Addressing HP Devesh said, “The situation is going from bad to worse emphasising that 15-20% of T3 community would close shops within the next 2-3 months and they in turn would stop the payment of the T2 dealers resulting in huge losses.”  He also emphasised that dealers are losing trust from vendors due to inaction by them. Several examples were given to them by Devesh Rastogi regarding predatory pricing and varoius advertisements regarding spurious toners were shown.

HP agreed  along with other officials stating, “HP is already maintaining SRP for fix price regime  purpose and he suggested that 2% discount on SRP is allowed as a customer price and committed to implement the same for all verticals. Prices on Flipkart will be corrected immediately, as they are their authorized dealers, but it is not the same with other portals. He also informed that HP has already approached CCI and possibly within next week will file a proper case. Legal ground being the use of HP logo by unauthorized portals in the online market place.” Ketan patel also agreed to add a minimum selling price criteria clause in the HP partner agreement.

It was also decided that UPCDA should nominate people from their side to be in the joint team to keep check against unethical practices taking place. HP will take action within 7 days on all issues raised therein. Ketan patel committed to appoint two dedicated HP persons for this cause.

HP said that he was seeking legal advice and also requested the UPCDA team that in case any practical solution was available to apprise the HP team with the same. Also a very valid statement was made and said that HP was always determined to fight the menace and would leave no stone unturned to see that things were set right

HP asked the UPCDA team to send the charter of demand so that valid comments could be sent in written to associations.

Joint secretary, Shiv Shankar Singh,UPCDA concluded the meeting and delivered thanks to all. He made everyone believe in ‘unity’ to solve issues affecting offline traders