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DQW Bureau
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Finally, it has happened after more than a year. Cyrix (VIA Technologies) has come back into the Indian market and this time hopefully for good. This is not only evident from its appointment of Karma as its distributor in India, but also the fact that it recently conducted road shows specifically for its resellers in Delhi. Plus, it has also announced the launch of Cyrix III processor--650 and 667 MHz versions--which will begin shipping in the country almost immediately.

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This essentially means that VIA has chalked out its Indian strategy together. Now, this has come not a day sooner as the domestic PC market would be close to 1.75 million by March 2001. That would mean that it would rank as one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

Although Intel already rules the roost here in terms of market share which is almost 90 percent, the fact of the matter remains that other players can also make their presence felt if they are as committed and as clear about the market as Intel is. And here Cyrix had made a big dent in its earlier innings when it had captured more than 15 percent share of the low-end PC market. In fact, it had made deep inroads in the reseller market by making some very aggressive noises plus offering its chips at very attractive prices. And the resellers heartily endorsed it as was seen by the spurt in demand for its processors.

The new strategy of Cyrix is to create a sub Rs 25,000 PC market. It remains to be seen how successful it is in this effort. Some three years back also, it had made a similar announcement that it is working with some Indian vendors towards offering a PC for just Rs 28,000, which was supposed to be a fully-functional multimedia machine and not just any vanilla system. Now, if it is able to achieve this target, both AMD and Intel could be in some trouble as it would be extremely difficult for them to match this figure given their current pricing structure.

Here it must be recalled that National Semiconductor--which earlier owned Cyrix--set up shop in the country almost 10 years back at Bangalore. But then in mid 1999 it sold off the Cyrix business to VIA of Taiwan. Since then Cyrix processors had disappeared from the Indian market.

To make its Indian strategy successful, Cyrix will have to instill a sense of confidence amongst the domestic vendors that it means business. Side by side, a concerted effort will have to made to get hold of resellers without whom it cannot hope to succeed in the country.

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