Toshiba Effacing CE- IT Divide!

Sivakumar. N
Vice President,
Toshiba India (P) Ltd. 

In the last three years, the company has invested a lot of time, money and energy in developing the channel for its consumer as well as the commercial segment in India. Today, there are close-to 1,000 dealers selling Toshiba laptops across India. Recently, the company manufacturing TV and the company manufacturing PC have been merged together into one company globally. In line with this global realignment, Toshiba India also realigned its two companies into one single division, which is called the Digital Product Home Appliance and Services. In India, this division also takes care of home appliances. Even after the merger, the go-to-market, to quite an extent, is the same. The company intends to have its TV dealers selling PCs and vice versa.    

What prompted you to merge consumer and IT products together?

We have seen that, at the end of the day, consumer is the same. Today, PCs are also becoming more and more individual-centric purchase. A student purchases a laptop and also uses it at his college. A professional buys a laptop and uses it at home as well as in office. So if our target consumer is the same, why not merge the division and focus more properly towards that consumer who is the user of all our products. 

Till 2007, HCL was Toshiba's only distributor in India. But due to some unavoidable reasons, from 2008 we had to rope in multiple distributors. We appointed distributors like Ingram Micro, Redington, Compuage, etc. We have opened four to five Toshiba-branded outlets in the last one and a half months. And our intention is to convert all PC dealers into TV dealers and vice versa. We have currently 3,500 dealers between PC and TV dealers. We are aiming to grow our dealers from 3,500 to 6,000 by next March. If possible, we would try to convince all 6,000 dealers to sell both PCs and TVs. 

How do you position your laptops? 

Over the years, we have invested a lot in growing our channel base or correcting our product lineup or even correcting our pricing to be more aligned with the market trends. We were, however, missing in terms of the customer recall. Today, if 10 customers walk into a store, not more than one or two ask for Toshiba. They may ask that they want a laptop, but they won't ask specifically for Toshiba laptops. Thus, it is important now that the brand recall surges up. We are aggressively working on our brand positioning. Once all the hoardings are up, we will be having in excess of 400 billboards across 80 cities. Last year, we signed Sachin Tendulkar as our brand ambassador and this has really boosted the visibility level. 

How would you position your laptop brands with other top three brands?

We have a good product lineup, and are in the top three. Further, we have priced our products at par with any other brand available or sometimes even better than them.  When it comes to technology, Toshiba is known as a technology brand. Coloured screen and Bluetooth was introduced in a laptop for the first time by Toshiba.

We have the brand name, we have the technology edge and we have the product lineup. There are more than 30 different models starting from the price of Rs.19,000/- going up to a lakh and plus. As I said, what is missing is the higher brand recall. If today there are two persons asking for a Toshiba laptop, our aim is to increase it from two to seven. Once this happens bringing up the numbers is not a big issue. And we have already started seeing this in the last two months. In the last two months, our sales have grown multiple times and we have already overtaken some of the biggest brands in some select markets. 

Why should channel partners sell Toshiba? What incentives are you giving to the channels?

There are margins in this business like any other business, but we make conscious efforts that our margins are in line with our business and sometimes even better. The biggest advantage that partners get in selling Toshiba is that unlike other brands where there must be around four to five thousand dealers across India selling the product lineup, there are now only thousand dealers selling Toshiba. Also, Toshiba dealers are no more restricted to sell PCs only, but they can even sell TVs and home appliances range. This gives the dealer a completely different set of customer spectrum to address.

Which are the promising markets for Toshiba? 

Our best market today is Kerala and this is because there is a mix of channel. We have good partners there and we have good brand recall there. But this does not restrict our focus from strengthening our pan-India presence.

Moumita Deb Choudhury
moumita@varindia.com