Acer India (Pvt) Ltd plans to spend Rs.70-75 crore for sales and marketing initiative during the current calendar year. It will include brand promotion and expanding its retail business. Acer India's total turnover from India was Rs.2,500 crore last year and of which nearly 30 per cent came from retail business.
The company plans to increase its brand presence through creating Acer outreach programme. Starting this year, the company has decided to focus on expanding its presence in B, C, and D-class towns.
As a part of this programme, the company has so far opened 750 Acer galleries (local partner-run touch points) and plans to expand this to 2,000 cities. It has so far covered 488 cities, said S. Rajendran, Chief Marketing Manager, Acer India, in an interaction with this correspondent. Earlier the company launched Acer malls and Acer points. So far there are 100 Acer malls, which are exclusive stores for Acer products, and 175 Acer points which are multi-brand stores. He said the company looked at government agencies and educational institutions as one of the major business generators for its products. Currently, Acer India gets nearly 60 per cent of its business through educational institutions, small medium enterprises and government agencies. In the last 18 months, the company started to focus on infrastructure projects such as (Unique Identification) UID programme, power sector, ports and highways. Many of these agencies have decided to purchase laptops for their executives to run the programmes.
Acer's major chuck of business came from the sale of laptops. The Gujarat Government has so far obtained nearly 60,000 laptops while Elcot in Tamil Nadu had purchased 13,000 laptops. The Uttar Pradesh Government had also purchased 15,000 laptops so far for its information, communication and technology project.
Use of technology in e-governance, policy making, network, highways projects, road transport office and in state assemblies are increasing many fold. Similarly in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and educational institutions, the use of technology has grown. On the corporate side, most of the top 30 companies are the customers of Acer, he said. Most corporates are entering into ‘yearly long rate contracts' with Acer.
On the product front, he said the company has recently launched 10 inch tablets and planned to come out with 7 inch tablets soon for the Indian customers. The 10 inch tablets come with five variants under the brand ICONIA, a new concept device with high intuitive all-point multi-touch functionality, wherein users can navigate seamlessly. The ICONIA series has been launched under Google Android Honeycomb 0.3 and Windows 7 platform operating systems.
