Unison to distribute Apple notebooks

Unison Infotech India Ltd., the Delhi-based distributor of

SNI systems, has been appointed to distribute Apple PowerBook G3 series and ibooks in the

country. Unison has become Apple's business partner in selling the notebooks along with

the other national distributors like GPTL, ERIL and Summit.

"As far as the Apple product lines are concerned we

will concentrate our activities only on notebooks. Right now our target is to sell around

350 PowerBook G3 by the end of the financial year," said Unison DGM (sales) Tapas

Sinha. It will also sell ibook G3 300 MHz when it is launched in India. The probable month

of launch is October.

Commenting on the appointment of Unison, Naren Ayyar, MD,

Apple Computer International Pvt Ltd, said, "Unison has specialized divisions that

meet our mobile computer distribution requirements in India. Both PowerBook G3 and the

iBook will benefit from this partnership."

Reacting to the question that why Unison has taken the

distributorship of Apple notebooks in a situation where the product has few takers, Sinha

replied, "We could have gone for other notebooks like Compaq, Toshiba or IBM. But we

don't want to go with the flow. The distributors of these notebooks only sell boxes but we

want to sell something more, a concept. And in that, Apple notebooks are the best buys in

terms of quality, memory capacity or fastness of the G3 processor. No one can rival

Apple's notebooks. The only problem is that Windows as an OS is more popular than Mac OS.

But certainly as an IT product, Powerbook G3 is much superior than any other

notebooks."

Unison also wants to cash in on the latest worldwide

release of iBook. It will be targeted in India at the SOHO and home segments with a price

around Rs 1.15 lakh. "With more than 260 resellers spread all over the country and

offices in Bangalore, Calcutta and Delhi, we hope that we will be successful in creating a

niche market for the Apple mobile computing products," added Sinha.