'Samsung enjoys 8% of the PC market share'

Lately, many people have started believing that the PC market has reached its maturity or saturation because of the tablet trend picking up. But Sungwon Song, senior vice president and leader of global PC sales & marketing, Samsung, has a different viewpoint. He rather believes that there are multiple reasons for PC adoption to grow. Also, he clearly demarcates the territories for the PCs and the tablets. In a recent visit to India, Dataquest stole a moment to discuss with him about PC market trends and get insights on the India strategy.

 

What is the outlook for the PC market in India? Has the tablet eaten up some of its demand?

The PC market is growing exponentially in India. Lately, the market has witnessed many evolutions and product innovations with a slew of slate PCs, all-in-one PCs, Chromebooks, Ultrabooks, etc.

As far as smartphones and tablets are concerned, we do not feel that one product segment is cannibalizing the growth of the other. Both PCs and tablets have clear-cut differentiators and are targeted at different segments. Tablets are used more for consuming lighter content such as email, IM, movies, etc, and PCs are more utilized for business purposes. Hence both markets are growing together and are also supporting each other.

Last year, there were some factors, such as depreciating rupee and the rising input costs due to the floods in Thailand, responsible for the slowdown in PCs, especially in the third and the fourth quarter. But the total growth throughout the year was great.

What are your key growth drivers in India?

Although Samsung entered the NotePC segment in 2009, but in a short span of time the company has scaled up its offerings in netbooks/notebooks segment. Since then, we have witnessed a double-digit growth every year and we are expecting a 100% growth this year as well. Globally, we see Samsung India as one of the crucial contributors to our overall mandate. Its the only brand in the world that designs and manufactures notebooks end to end.

How is Samsungs PC portfolio different from its competitors?

Currently, for PCs we enjoy 8% of the market share in India and we aim to increase it to 12-13% this year. Samsung has an extensive portfolio of over 30 netbook and notebooks models in India, priced in the range between '15,990 and '100,000.

We have introduced a richer configuration and a whole host of color variants. For instance, last year we launched Samsung series 9, the first-generation laptops, which were considered one of the thinnest notebooks in the world. Similarly, we are planning to launch our much-hyped Ultrabook series 5 in the Indian market later this month. The product captured the attention of the global audience at CES 2012.

What are your sales target for the PC division? How do you plan to reach out to customers?

We have a significant thrust on the channel division for our PC segment. Our retail outreach includes the Samsung exclusive retail-comprising of Samsung IT brandshops, Samsung Smartphone Cafs, and over 300 Samsung Digital Plazas-as well as the large format retail stores like Croma and multi-brand retail stores.

In terms of our B2B business, we are now in a position to offer our consumers integrated solutions across notebooks, mobiles, and large format displays. We have over 3,600 service centers in India for our entire product portfolio.