What is the market size of SMBs in India?
NETGEAR has a strong foothold in the Indian market; currently NETGEAR’s estimated SMB Networking market (excluding enterprise) size in India is approximately around 700 Crores including Storage &Business wireless. Our SMB wireless business is growing fast at the rate of 35% YoY, Switching at 22% and NAS at 40% growth for NETGEAR.
What are your offerings in the market?
NETGEAR® offers a unique portfolio of highly flexible and scalable networking for Small and Medium businesses which includes switches, wireless access points and network storage.
NETGEAR Business products are designed for small and medium businesses; which offer rich features of networking that are required by modern and demanding businesses at a price they can afford.
In switches, NETGEAR has been offering connectivity for every business needs, from 5 to 144 ports, with Gigabit, Multi-Gigabit or 10-Gigabit copper and/or fiber connectivity, intuitive network management options and advanced L2 and L3 features, comprehensive PoE support and unique form factors (Click, Easy-Mount, Desktop, Rackmount).
NETGEAR is unrivalled in the switching choice it offers to its business customers and has been the undisputed leader for more than 20 years.
NETGEAR’s wireless access points and controllers also offer a unique combination of features for enhanced and affordable coverage, speed, density and reliability. Our ReadyNAS® storage solutions offers outstanding performance, versatility and scalability with five levels of unrivalled data protection, 10-Gigabit Fiber or Copper Ethernet network interface on select models, and expandable storage capacity desktop or rackmount.
Our latest innovation also includes our Insight Management Solutions that bridges together these business networking solutions for businesses and resellers. NETGEAR Insight provides simplified, feature-rich monitoring and management of Insight managed wireless access points, switches and network storage, all under a central dashboard. It either allows businesses to have full control of their network, even across multiple sites or from their home or with its dedicated Insight Pro offering for resellers. It allows resellers to move up the value chain and build a profitable Network Management Services business for increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.
What are your challenges in the market?
India has been one of the most promising markets for NETGEAR after the US.
Our founders could foresee the potential of India and will soon celebrate 20 years of business in India.
Our most prominent challenge has been the increasing demand for high quality products offerings at the lowest price points. Thanks to the high-expectations of the Indian market on reliability and cost-effectiveness, that we have been able to apply the learning’s from the tough Indian markets to apply in other markets to become successful.
As quoted and implemented by Ravi Venkatesan in his book “Conquering the chaos”, “We have developed the products for the Indian market consisting of 70% Enterprise features at 30% of the cost”.
Also, one of the main challenges for NETGEAR in the business space today is brand awareness. NETGEAR is currently seen mainly as a home brand (even though we sell millions of switches to business users and are the leaders in Unmanaged switches in the world). NETGEAR has to fight in the Business space against more well-known Enterprise brands. We need to convince businesses that we can provide the major Enterprise features with reliability at a much lower price tag. Our products are designed for the SMBs which are affordable and easier to use.
What is your channel strategy?
In India, working closely with the local partners is crucial, local support and understanding their requirements are essential to survive the market. Hence, to penetrate the market deeply and support its customers in the best possible way,
NETGEAR aims to work closely through its local distributors and resellers in India.
It is important for us to set up a right channel so that our products reach the masses. We are investing heavily to improve our support and customer services. Regular training programs and partner alignments is helping us to achieve desired growth in India. We aspire to introduce new products for emerging markets which also differentiates us from our competitors.
What is your marketing strategy?
In India, we are focused on investing through local events that will enable us to strengthen our footprints across all regions and increase the number of channel partners across India.
Globally, NETGEAR is the leader in SMB space and has been innovating during the last 2 decades to bring out the best of networking products/solutions for small and medium businesses. We are trying to reach out to the businesses to drive demand to our partners through various media such as social media, articles or events. India is huge market for us and we are trying to optimize the marketing efforts and reach out to our audience in the most efficient way. Having said that, we do not wish to have huge marketing effort to impact our profitability and the cost of our products to the customers. Our main goal is customer satisfaction.
