AMD appoints two new master resellers

Asim Raina & Shweta Sharma

NEW DELHI: With aggressive marketing strategies in place and road shows

across the country in nine cities, Advance Micro Devices (AMD) has appointed two

new master resellers -- Mumbai based Priya Ltd. and Delhi based Cyberstar

Infocom --to make its inventory readily available across the country.

According to Sanjeev Keskar, country manager, AMD India, "Impetus is on

building loyal channel partners across the nation. AMD is a price performance

product. Its USP needs to be leveraged enough across the market. And we are

looking forward to having such kind of channel partners."

To provide the required push in the market, AMD will aggressively go in for

registering a bigger number of active resellers to its present list of 1,000 odd

resellers across the nation.

At present AMD has six master resellers -- Great World, Zeta, Priya, Abacus,

Mediaman (all from Mumbai) and Cyberstar in Delhi. To provide its master

resellers better profitability, it is now recommending all of them to stock

their inventories on a weekly basis, unlike the previous practice of stocking

monthly inventories. This will protect them from frequent price fluctuations and

also immune them from paying a 20 per cent duty on inflated prices.

Keskar said that south and east India were the biggest market for AMD and the

company would like to propel more of its presence there. Very aggressive with

its educative advertising campaigns, AMD is targeting every segment. It will

soon be in the process of talking to various OEMs to provide AMD chips in their

PC brands.

On the lines of educating the consumer, it is opening the first of its kind

AMD centers at three locations across the country -- Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.

At present, it has 13 Athlon centers all over India, which are also slated to

undergo a change. The three new centers would be exclusive ones where an end

consumer can evaluate and get first hand experience of an AMD machine. Keskar is

looking for interested partners to open such centers.

AMD is also revamping its present reseller reward scheme which so far has

been a completely Web based scheme. Under the old scheme, resellers could

register and keep track of schemes by being online. But now, the company aims to

bring more flexibility by offering the reseller the option of offline also. In

addition, rewards are also being revamped to make it more attractive to

resellers. As Keskar puts it, "The focus is on creating loyal

partners."

Meanwhile, AMD has become gold partner of Microsoft for the soon-to-be

launched Windows XP. It will be present in all the seven road shows that will be

organized by Microsoft over the next one month.

With its financial year ending in December, Keskar is bullish on the Indian

market and the future outlook. He expects to open two more offices at Bangalore

and Mumbai early next year, besides adding more manpower to its current tally of

five.