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Netgear provides wired and wireless networking solutions for the home, business, and SOHO networks. Yogesh Sharma, country manager, Netgear, spoke to Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News about the company’s journey so far and its growth plans.
It’s been approximately six months since you took charge at Netgear. How has the journey been for you and the company?
It has definitely been a good change for me – from D-Link to Netgear. From handling one region there, I am handling a very big territory in Netgear – India and SAARC. I am managing the entire business, sales, support, policy, operations, etc. for Netgear.
I believe everyone has their place in the industry and we are trying to find place for ourselves. Everything takes little time but then the good thing about Netgear is that the products are good, pricing is good and visibility is good. Infact, we are now a major player in wireless products in India and are now trying to push other Netgear products. These include business products like switching products, broadband products – both wired and wireless, etc. We have storage product also which are mainly meant for small and medium businesses (SMBs). We also have lot of firewall products again to cater to the need of SMEs.
These products are already available in India. The movement so far has not been the way it has been for wireless products. So we are now trying to position those products also and we have been very successful so far.
What kind of product portfolio does Netgear have? What are your target segments?
Our entire product range can take care of almost all product LAN requirements of any company. Almost 90 per cent -95 per cent of the LANs can be networked by using our product. Requirement of up to 1,500-2,000 nodes can be fulfilled using Netgear products.
We have a lot of corporate customers. ICICI is one of the major accounts that we have in India. In addition to this, there are a few banks that have recently deployed our wireless products. We are now trying to position our business products also to these customers.
Most of our business is coming from BFSI. Government is also a growing segment. Apart from this we are also looking at the health sector in a big way. In banking, apart from the nationalized banks we are also focusing on the cooperative banks.
What kind of setup do you have in India? Please throw some light on your partner training program?
We have a team six people in sales and support and approximately 200 people working in the India call center. We have three national distributors – Rashi Peripherals, Cyberstar Infocom and Advent Technologies. The good thing about these three is that they all try to operate in different segments.
SI training is one thing that we want to carry on. From my own experience this helps a company from a lot of perspectives. Front-end people who go to the market share the customer feedback with us, they tell company how they themselves feel about Netgear, etc. and this helps in planning for the future.
We are undertaking a partner training program where we are planning to roll out our SI training centers all over the country. To begin with we would touch upon all the big cities – like Lucknow, Jaipur, Delhi, Dehradun and are trying to cover all the A and B class cities in the first phase. Based on the success of the first phase we would decide on future course of action for the next phase.
How is Netgear different from your competitors?
We differ from our competitors on the basis of ease of installation, usability and post sales support. We have been giving swap warranties so instead of repairing any product; we swap it with a new one. Most of the products barring a few carry three-year warranty, while two of them even carry five year warranty. This is quite unique and no other networking company offers this as a part of the product. Few companies do offer but they charge separately. Price wise also we are quite competitive.
We collect lot of feedback from our partners and distributors and depending on the feedback or suggestion, we also do our own assessment of the products after launching it in the country. Based on this we customize our products depending on the local needs. The customization is done in our warehouses and manufacturing facilities. We don’t have our own manufacturing facilities. We outsource it to many places in China, Taiwan, etc.
We outsource only manufacturing. But to ensure quality to match our expectation and our customers’ expectation, we have deputed our own team there. We have our own quality and R&D team at the location and Netgear people are monitoring even the manufacturing processing.
What would be your India strategy going forward?
Our India operations are growing at a tremendous pace. Broadband would be one of our major driving factors for our growth. We want to position the company as one of the reputed networking organization in the country, be profitable, make our partners profitable and go for a long lasting association.
Our last two quarters have been tremendous for us. We are definitely looking at somewhere between 150 per cent -200 per cent growth this year.
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