Asus bets on offline retail, to add 1,000 retail points

Taiwanese tech major Asus is bullish on expanding its presence in offline retail, adding about 1,000 retail points over the next year as it witnesses continuous strong demand in the consumer and gaming segments, a top company official said.

The company, which had 7.5% share in the Indian PC segment in the September quarter (as per IDC), currently has its products available at over 6,000 retail points along with online channels.

"Post lifting of lockdown, the demand continues to be strong. From about 2.5 lakh units a month, the sales for the industry have doubled and the trend is expected to continue for some time as people continue to work and study from home," Asus India Business Head of Consumer and Gaming PC (System Business Group) Arnold Su told PTI.

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He added that the company saw 39% growth in October 2020 over the same month last year.

Su said gaming has been a major growth driver within the consumer PC segment in the last few months, and especially in the festive month of October.

"We want to continue this strong momentum. One of the reasons for our strong performance is the outreach we made in the past few months - both online and offline. We have 120 exclusive stores (Asus Exclusive Stores or AES) in India, and are present in premium shop in shops (100 at the end of September) and smaller points of sale at various dealer points," he said.

So currently, there are over 1,100 such points of sale as well as 5,000 traditional dealer shops - which takes the total to more than 6,000 offline sales points across India.

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Asus had, in February, started onboarding its offline retail partners on a digital platform to help them connect with customers.

"All these efforts are bearing fruits for us and we have been able to grow our share in the Indian market. While we continue to focus on bringing an expansive feature-packed portfolio of products across price points, we also want to ensure customers can easily procure these devices," Su said.

He added that the company is working on adding about 1,000 more retail points in the coming quarters.

"This will include taking the number of AES to 200 (from 120), premium shop-in-shops to 2,000 (from 1,100) along with expansion of dealer shops as well," he added.

As per IDC, the PC market in India (desktops, notebooks, and workstations) registered 9.2% year-on-year growth in the July-September 2020 quarter, shipping 3.4 million units as the demand for e-learning and remote working remained strong.

Although the commercial segment had very few government and education projects, the consumer segment recorded its biggest quarter ever with 2 million shipments, growing 41.7% year-on-year in the said quarter. HP led the tally with 28.2% share, followed by Lenovo (21.7%), Dell Technologies (21.3%), Acer Group (9.5%) and Asus (7.5%) in the September 2020 quarter.