Future is miniaturisation and high performance of devices: Harish Kohli, President, Acer India

By Srinath Srinivasan

Recently, Acer introduced a series of high performance laptops with its Concept D series, where other brands are already trying to get a good market share. As per a recent IDC report, Acer had a 6.3% global market share in consumer PC sales, in July-September 2019, a 0.7% decline from a year ago.

Harish Kohli, president and managing director, Acer India, talks to FE’s Srinath Srinivasan about the process behind cracking the segment and improving market share during a slowdown. Excerpts:

Why is this segment important to you and what goes behind designing high performance products?

Earlier, desktops were the only option for people seeking high performance and it involved acquiring high-cost parts and putting them together. Laptops with high configurations were also not that portable. Today, users who are into high performance computing want a compact device that they can take anywhere with some of the highest configurations under the hood. To address this growing demand, we innovated in design which can bring the size and noise down. Today, our laptops produce high efficiency cooling and noise under 38 decibels. This is a first in this segment and the performance is dictated by latest 9th and 10th generation intel chips and NVIDIA graphics cards. The future is going to be about miniaturisation of devices and high performance.

How important is it for you to engage with developer/gaming community and how are you doing it?

We have to build up and take care of the entire ecosystem. Gamer recognition has to happen for gamers and our gaming series predator comes with a predator gaming league. Regional-level contests happen with large rewards, sometimes as high as $5,00,000. In addition, we are planning to put out a platform called planet nine. We will have both gamers and coaches registering on it and anyone can get trained by experts from any part of the world. In order to do all this we also have partnerships with many software and hardware players. E-gaming has already qualified as a sport. With a mindset change, soon it will also be a subject in univeristies which will complete the ecosystem. Today universities offer courses for game developers but not gamers.

How crucial is after sales support for this and what’s your strategy to have a strong support system?

It is one of our strongest areas. We are almost 20 years old in India and we don’t differentiate our customers based on the geogrpahy they come from. For instance, one of our large customers is Jammu and Kashmir Bank and 75% of the branches is in J&K. We built up a system to make sure that both spare and technicians are available on demand. We also trained them to go into a hostile region like that. Taking lessons from all these experiences, we have a much more robust system for premium products and in well developed regions of the country, especially for the consumer segment and not just for enterprises.

What are some challenges that you expect in the coming years?

We can provide high-end hardware and there will still be some cons during the product lifetime. Most of it are based on how the OS platforms work in tandem with the high-end hardware. This will vary from Windows to MacOS. This might make many users look out for better products with time. Although we can’t do much about it, this is the challenge we are faced with today.

Source: Financial Express