AMD’s bringing an Ultrathin offering at a lower cost to the slim and light laptop category. Chandrahas Panigrahi, Country Manager – Consumer and Retail, AMD India, in conversation with Pupul Dutta
What are the developments at AMD?
We now have three business divisions: consumer, commercial and components. Secondly, AMD and Intel recently reached a landmark agreement against anti-competitive practices.
We revamped our product line up with the acquisition of ATI Technologies and started integrating graphics into the CPU, which we call it APU or Access Processing Unit. With this, the user gets better battery life and a strong product around high definition. The consumer side of the business is being driven by the consumerization of IT, mobility and digital content. Hence, all of our products are designed keeping these requirements in mind.
Is there demand for slim and light laptops?
What has happened is that, because of the need for mobility, the thin and light form factor has been reinvented. Moreover, with the advent of tablets, content consumption has grown manifold.
Of late, Intel has been talking aggressively about this subject but we also have a product called Ultrathin. The significant advantage of this for a consumer as opposed to what the competition is selling would be higher battery life of almost 12 hours, a whole range of applications around the graphics power and an affordable price. Ultrathins are going to be priced around Rs 22,000-45,000, which will take the entire thin and light category into the mainstream. At the same time, we are not compromising on power.
When will we see Ultrathins in the market?
The products will soon be launched by Samsung and other OEMs like HP, Acer, etc. A month later people will see more high performance gadgets in the market.
In what way were you able to bring down the pricing of slim and light laptops?
The Ultrathins are divided into three segments namely entry, mainstream and premium. They are segmented by price band. Some are already available but more mainstream options will be available next month onwards. The premium ones though would only come out by August. The entry-level stuff would be priced at Rs 22,000 onwards while the premium version would retail for around Rs 45,000. We are giving the right price to consumers and not offering a cheaper version but rather a product that offers value for money.
Since you are talking about price, do you expect to attract customers through your pricing given the fact the market for Ultrabooks has not yet picked up?
The challenge has been with regards to how we can best present our products to the consumer. Despite rich features, we have not attracted much attention. However, we feel that the time has come when we have to start attacking niche segments. Having said that, we do not pin our hopes solely on good publicity but believe that consumers will buy our product because of its benefits.
What would be your go-to-market strategy?
We have realized that marketing strategy is a vital thing for us. We have set up an entire retail division where we have hired people to focus on this particular aspect. From sales managers to area managers, we train them to position our products in a way that would help them sell. We are also engaging with a lot of OEMs. We are also looking at long term relationships with our OEMs and distributors.
We are focusing on bringing about a sense of consistency in our presence and engagement with partners. We have opened AMD stores that are selling all of our products. Currently, we have six to seven of them spread across the country from Cochin to Delhi and in places like Varanasi as well. By the end of this year, we will have ramped up the store count into the higher double digits. We are also constantly engaging with large format retailers like Chroma, Vijay Sales etc.
Currently, we are at 11% market share according to IDC and we plan to capture at least 20% by end 2012.
