With the IT hardware products becoming commodities and the competition in the market shooting up, the component and accessory vendors are losing advantage over each other. However, the companies are trying to bring innovative products and finding newer markets to create a better mind share – at least Transcend is doing so.
Standing true to the meaning of its name, Transcend has evolved from its previous position. Started as a memory module company, it offers now an assortment of PC peripherals including external storage, MP3 & MP4, Pen Drives, Card Readers, DVD drives, Memory module and many more. Its present portfolio of products can stand eye to eye with the likes of SanDisk and storage vendors like Seagate and WD – at least for external storage devices.
From the market perspective the company believes that India is one of the fastest growing markets along with Russia, Japan and Germany – at least from the revenue contribution perspective. India contributes 15 per cent of their overall revenue, which is better than their performance in China. Even from the memory products’ market share perspective, they are the leader in this geography. Therefore the company think tank believes it is worth their time to spend more man-hour in this country than anywhere else. Therefore one can see in every quarter someone from their Taiwan HO flies down to this market for two weeks to work with their local partners across India. This quarter it is the turn of Hugo Lee, Sales Manager and Ted Cheng, Account manager duo to spend time with the local partners in India and visit cities including Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore. Their objective is to maintain relation with their current partners and look for some industrial customers.
The company’s strategy is not to consolidate its position in the traditional memory market but also address the emerging market including Apple and Android market. Plus their focus is to work closely with various vertical industries.
Therefore focusing on the Apple products, which its competitors do not have, Transcend has brought out a range of Apple solution especially for MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Added Lee, “Out of the entire end user compute population in India 5-10% are Apple products, therefore Apple solutions, which include JetDrive SSD, JetDrive SSD upgrade kit, JetDrive Lite flash cards, special memory module for the MacBooks, etc.
Lee said, “We find that there is an increased demand for Mac solutions in India. Our newly launched product JetDrive SSD upgrade kit iOS, is an internal memory solution but you can take it out and put it in the slick aluminium USB 3.0 external casing to make it an external storage for Mac.”
Good thing about this offering is that any Mac user can integrate it as the kit comes with all necessary tools to make the fitting possible and the user can opt from various capacities from 240 GB to 960GB capacity.
He added, “Right now we do not have any competition in this product segment. We are the only vendor in the market to provide this product for Apple. No Kingston or no SanDisk has this product. Our SD cards for Apple machines are designed as per the product speck of Apple MacBooks.”
It means the product has little extensions at the back, which makes it easier to tuck into the MacBook slot and the users can add up to 128 GB capacity.
Lee maintained, “The memory module we have for the MacBooks are tested properly whereas the generic memory modules, which can go into the MacBook also, are not properly tested. Even the memory modules that our competition offers for the MacBooks are also not properly tested.”
Although Transcend has launched products for MacBooks, the company is also equally sensitive to other markets therefore the company has brought out new products for Android OS and Windows OS.
The latest offering for Andoid smartphone is OTG card reader and OTG pen drive. The card reader takes MicroSD card, SD Card and Pend Drives.
Apart from bringing innovative products to the market, the company also concentrates on developing business relation with large SIs to take their memory solutions to various project opportunities in the country. The company is already working with customers like Infosys, HCL, Wipro, Accenture, Intel, for a long time.
In addition to these activities, Transcend moots to have one dedicated person stationed in the country to look after developing industrial business for them. Plus, Lee says, “In future, the sales persons from Taiwan will stay in India for a long time – up to two months at a stretch to overlook the smooth functioning of the operation.
Plus the company wishes to take its marketing activities to the second level. The company today sells to both online channel and offline channel. It has ten distributors in India to cater to both the channels. When the traditional IT channel market is opposing the progress of online channels and trying to influence the vendors to refrain from selling products to the latter, Transcend has maintains a healthy relation with both. Lee maintains, “The formula is simple, we do not have different pricing policy for online and offline channels. It means you pay same amount if you buy from online. Plus we sell different models for different channel.”
Finally…
Besides its commercial engagement in the country, Transcend also wants to support various causes in India, which is part of their CSR activities. Lee maintains, we want to supported the educational institutes in the country, which are need PCs and storage devices for their under privileged students.
