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ViewSonic consolidates its channel network

Besides channel realignment, the company is also awaiting to get permission from its headquarter to restart the rupee billing

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Sandhya
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ViewSonic India has been going through management instability for the last couple of years, after the sudden exit of Ajay Sharma. Now, the company has reappointed Kuldeep Ramaiya as country manager for India business. With Ramaiya joining in, the company has announced major changes in the channel distribution model. Hence to make the distribution business more agile and channel-friendly, the company has cut down on its over distribution for monitors and projectors. Moving forward, the company has merged its core and mobility business. However, the focus has been diluted on smartphones and tablets.

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In an exclusive and candid interaction, Ramaiya told The DQ Week, "In the last 1 year we have experienced bumpy rides, having said that we are all geared up to restart our channel engagements and have a fresh start. To begin with our monitors, business we have recently done consolidation of our national distribution. Earlier we were having five national distributors including Priya, Iris Computers, Rashi Peripherals, Roop Technologies and Inspan. Ever since I joined, the first thing done was to do cut down on the over distribution. Therefore with due deliberations and taking a cautious step we decided to continue with only two distributors Rashi Peripherals and Roop Technologies for monitors business for the entire range.

"Since, monitors business is highly low on margin and volatile in nature, it was highly required to have limited national distributors and pick up volumes slowly. Currently, we are doing units of 25,000-30,000 monitors in a month," he pointed out.
Ramaiya also assured that this time he will be playing a long innings at ViewSonic and his priority is to stabilize the business with right business policy, set of partners, developing robust sales team and filling all the missing gaps by early next year.

The other area of attention for ViewSonic is its projectors business. Besides it will follow new emerging products like digitizers and smart monitor, the world first 22 inch Android based all-in-one PC monitors, which are expected to hit the Indian market by end of this year. Nevertheless, it will also revive its digital photo frame and digital signage business, both the business are yet to take up in the market.

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In the last few months, our projector business has started growing by double digit. When I joined back, our projectors were dwindling, however, we were not having over distribution, but we were lacking in right alignment with the right set of national distributor. "For projectors we were having Redington as our national distributor. Now, Redington is not our active distributor and we have replaced it with Hyderabad distributor Aveco Technologies. The rational to rope in Aveco was its expertise in audio video and office automation channel. As per the current alignment, we have two distributors for projectors Aveco and Roop technologies," he added.

Moreover, for the government business, the company has also dropped Delhi based Genius Presentation distributor and extended the same role to Aveco for the DGS&D rate contract business.

Besides channel realignment and consolidation, the company is also awaiting to get permission from its headquarter to restart the rupee billing. Currently, the national distributor is directly importing the materiel and selling to the channel. Hence to get more close to the channel and mange inventory, locally ViewSonic India team intend to have local billing.

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The company is also rolling out quarterly schemes to ramp the numbers; at the same time it is also clearing the pending back-end of its channel. Lastly, the current focus of the company is to beef up its sales team. It has added area sales manager in Lucknow and Chennai. It may add another 6 people to the current team of 15 people.

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