HEADLINES
JOBS
COM:PORT
POLICY POLICE
ARCHIVES

Amkette is reinforcing distribution channel

A good part of the investment will go into the opening of Amkette Essential Points, Amkette's exclusive retail outlets for high-volume products.

T O D A Y

• B K Syngal explodes! • HCL 'Infostructure' • Amkette's Rs 30m plan • Siemens' India focus

There are 1,200 AEPs countrywide, of which about 500 are in Delhi. Amkette plans to change this skewed ratio by improving the total number to 5,000 by the end of 1998.

It plans to locate most of the new AEPs outside Delhi. Apart from AEPs, Amkette is also targeting music stores to double as retailers for the company's CD racks, CD couriers, disk couriers, recordable CDs etc.

The target for 1998 also includes the appointment of 24 additional distributors nation-wide. These distributors will be selected on their market presence and the strength of their dealer/reseller/retailer channels, according to an Amkette official.

A part of the channel development budget is also being allocated to finance a heavy advertising campaign that Amkette sees as essential to improve its mindshare in the market and to stay ahead of competition.

"We try to reach the desktop every which way. Our objective is to have at least one Amkette product on every desktop,'' said Rajiv Bapna, managing director, Amkette. The company tries to achieve this through one of the largest distribution channels for IT in the country.

It has three main distribution centres in Delhi, Bombay and Udaipur, and seven additional centres at Calcutta, Bhopal, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Madras.

"We are able to bring the distribution costs down for our distributors through the large number of products (21currently). But we still have to improve our retailer channel,'' said Bapna.

The distributor channel is exclusive to the company. These, in turn, sell the products through dealers and resellers who number about 10,000. Apart from this, the company also engages in direct sales to 500 of its top corporate customers in the country.

Amkette products are also sold through gift stores and stationers who form the retailer segment of the channel. These are supported by Amkette Essential Points.

Amkette has recently been contracted by Hewlett- Packard to be the 'media fulfilment agent' for the driver software for all of HP's peripherals.

Amkette will initially restrict its media fulfilment services for HP to Delhi. The company has also been the media fulfilment centre for Microsoft for a year now with offices in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Bangalore for this purpose.

- Compiled from the Indian media

Tell us what you think of this story