Made in India, made for India

With vendors increasingly trying to binge on low cost offerings to capture markets, Dell has unveiled Dell 500, a laptop that comes with onsite warranties. Priced at Rs 24,500 these laptops are made for the Indian audience and made in India.

Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News spoke to Paul-Henri Ferrand, president of Dell-Asia Pacific (APACS) during the launch to know more.

The journey of Dell in India forms a case study for companies who look up to India for setting base. How do you view the scenario for Dell now?

Some years ago, Dell in India was nobody. However, by 2007 end and beginning of 2008, IDC has mentioned Dell as the number one player ahead of even HP.

Dell is investing heavily in India. We want to be the number one IT vendor in India. We are one of the fastest growing IT vendors in APJ markets ahead of HP and others.

We have witnessed sustained and improved results every quarter and we are building up our momentum. If you look at the US, we are growing at about 15 per cent and the rest of the world at about 27 per cent.

What have been the primary drivers for Dell and the markets that you mainly focus on?

We recognize Brazil, Russia, India and China and certain other countries as emerging markets and these are the countries where we would focus on building our infrastructure.

India and China would be the primary drivers of the markets and there would be a significant change in the way the markets would appear in 2015. In 2009, you would witness laptops overtaking desktops in terms of the volumes being sold and that is a significant trend, which would shape up the markets.

There was a staggering 160 billion of GigaBytes of data that moved around the web world in 2006-07 and in the next five years this figure would multiply by six. Imagine, the amount of storage that would be required to store the information in your mobile phones, laptops, PCs etc.

For us emerging markets are going to be the fastest growing markets in the world and we want to reinforce these markets in a consistent manner with our products and services.

We aim to localize our products to suit the needs of this nation and with our strategy we are demonstrating that we understand the market place and we are ready to offer services to our corporate customers, SME customers globally and local.

We are going to focus a lot on laptops and whole range of products. Our strategy would help us become the number one player in India.

Could you talk on the Dell 500?

This is a product that is ‘Made in India and Made for India”. It comes with Windows CP and Ubuntu Linux. We are the only company, which would offer an onsite warranty for the entry-level model itself. It also comes with a direct multimedia playback, card reader and Wi-Fi catcher.