Upcountry on AOC’s radar

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Expanding its reach and penetration in the Indian market, AOC is eyeing B-class cities as its potential market for Q4 2008 and C-class cities for 2009.

The company recently opened its offices in Mumbai and Kolkata and has come up with two set ups in Guwahati and Chandigarh. AOC is also expanding its manpower base and has developed a team of 46 people for sales and marketing.

The August 2008 edition of Dataquest had reported that the brand, which had received the maximum traction over the last year, was AOC, and this slightly affected Samsung and LG’s monitor business.

AOC became the third largest monitor brand. AOC also tied up with Compuage Infocom as national distributor for South, West and central India.

AOC is gearing up to increase its penetration in B-class cities. The company is also working on the ground activities for increasing it’s branding and is coming out with various schemes targeting the end-customers.

There was a 20 percent price slash in the last four months in panels and this has reduced the cost of LCD screens. AOC has marked a 30 to 35 percent growth in the first three quarters of the year and is expecting to achieve growth of 15 percent in the fourth quarter.

“AOC marked good growth in the first three quarters of 2008. However, the fourth quarter is appearing to be on lower side as the market is in a bad shape and no one can predict anything at this stage. There is shortage of liquidity in the market and this will affect the sales of monitors also. We are targeting to achieve a growth of 15 percent,” said Mukesh Gupta, Director, AOC.

He further added, “We have already marked a dominant presence in metros and now we are in the process of cracking the upcountry markets like Jalandhar, Jaipur and Indore.”

According to an IDC report, AOC has grabbed 14 percent marketshare in Q2 2008 and achieved the target of 1,43,000 monitors in the same quarter. In Q3 it was 2,00,000 units.

On the channel partner front, AOC had 1,750 dealers in Q2 and expanded the base to 2,100 dealers by Q3.

Commenting on further channel expansion plans, Gupta said, “We do not have any fixed number of channel we want to appoint. It is an ongoing process and will add partners as per the market requirement.”

The national distributors of AOC are Vision Enterprise for North and East India, and Creative for Maharashtra.