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Digital has
recently undergone a structural reorganization, and its Indian
leadership has passed onto the hands of the EMEA headquarters.
Though Sushil Bandi continues to be the Country Manager, the India
business is being headed by Khwaja Saifuddin Ahmad, who as a Senior
Sales Director has undertaken the responsibility of the South Asia
region, in addition to EMEA.
This reorganization is
slated to reflect most on the company's channel business and at the
marketing front, for the simple reason that the new leadership is
trying to replicate its EMEA success in India as well. The company
believes that Indians can run the India business much better, as they
tend to understand the market in a much better way, know the DNA and
what exactly works here. So, instead of spending time and money on
experiments, they know exactly what can work and what cannot. And
then, they can take the message back to higher management in a much
more understandable way. According to Ahmad, India
needed much more focus in the APAC region, as there are countries
like China, Vietnam, Philippines, and Australia amongst others, that
are also growing at a faster pace like India. The India structure
remains unchanged, as it was before. It is just that the country
manager of India instead of reporting to APAC, now reports to the
Dubai office. Even the strategy per say remained unchanged. Instead
of planning and implementation being done at APAC, is done out of
Dubai.
However, WD is still in
the process of establishing its footprint in the Indian market,
especially in the external storage or the consumer market. Though it
claims to be the world's largest hard drive manufacturer and being at
the top position on the external side for the last two years, the
management is finding out the reasons as to why the company is not
able to break-in the Indian market. “The only pitfall here is that
we do not have a neutral market agency or market analyst, who does
mapping of hard drive industry in India. Although we do have partners
like IDC and others, but they do not cover hard drive industry.
Unfortunately in India, we are still looked upon as underdogs,”
said Ahmad.
The company is also
working on its channel structure in terms of consolidation. Today, it
has about six to seven focused and committed distributors, including
HCL, Redington, Global, and Jupiter. It has also partnered with
Neoteric Infomatique for LFR business and Ingram Micro for HP
externals. Besides, Redington is one of its key partners in Middle
East as well. As a direct relationship in terms of supply, WD works
with local OEM branches of HCL, Wipro, and Zenith. As far as the
channel
partners are concerned, it is directly in touch with them, wherein it
constantly keeps them updated on the products, give them technical
know-hows on new products, and take feedback from them. The company
has one-on-one interaction relationship with the channel partners.
Meanwhile, the major share
of WD's India business comes from home or the single point users. SOHO
and enterprise are still trying to match up with it. This is
the area where it is working on educating the consumers. “The
knowledge or educational side is still lacking with the masses.
However, it is not going to be easy to break this mindset, seeing the
sheer size of the market, the geographical break up, and different
buying patterns. It would be a challenge, as it is not 'one size fit
all' market. For every consumer, there is a different need and you
have to adapt yourself to these needs. Market will never change for
you,” asserted Ahmad.
At the moment, globally,
WD enjoys close to 40 percent market share on internal drives and it
would like to follow the same for India. For the external drives, it
is already enjoying a much larger market share around the world and
that's the same, which it needs for the Indian market as well. The
company's target is to reach these figures in next one year.