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Wipro Acer sales may gross Rs 3.5 billion

Also, the company is to spend more on building the Wipro Acer joint brand name, a shift from its earlier stance of price-led and tactical advertising.

Suresh Vaswani, chief executive, Wipro Acer, said that expansion of the reseller channel, better control on inventory (already brought down from 101

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days in April to 11 days in September), and new product launches would not only improve the company's sales to Rs 3.5 billion but also improve its profitability.

The company is to improve its monitor business and is looking at increasing sales from 2,000 monitor a month and to strengthen its presence in regions other than Bangalore and Madras, where it is strong, Vaswani said.

Wipro Acer expects to enter into original equipment manufacture arrangements with bigger Indian PC companies such as Zenith. Vaswani said he expects to increase the sale of PCs to around 50,000 units in 1997-98 from 35,000 sold last fiscal. "The year '96-97 was a tough year with PCL's predatory pricing and there was a huge pressure on margins. The marketplace is healthier now," he said.

Vaswani said the assemblers, who had more or less disappeared last year, had put in a stronger reappearance. "No multinational brand has been able to get to a price point comfortably near that offered by the assembly and the other Indian brands," he said.

Wipro Acer was the largest selling multinational brand of PCs in 1996-97 and expects to stay at the top this year too, Vaswani said. The aim is not just to stay at the top of the MNC companies in sales but to get ahead in overall PC sales too, he said.

Vaswani estimates that around 450,000 to 500,000 units were sold in the country in 1996-97 and the number will increase to 600,000 in 1997-98, "if everything goes right we have to address a larger segment of the market, address the home segment far more strongly," Vaswani said.

The joint venture has been doing reasonably well but Wipro needs to exploit the server software segment a little more, he said.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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