Networking business in India has been growing Year on Year with healthy growth rate. The brands are bringing innovative, latest and affordable products for all set of customers. Even the channel partners have much more options to serve their customer in better ways. TP-Link has been also bringing the advanced and innovative devices for their customer in India. Bijoy Alaylo, General Manager – Sales, TP-Link India Pvt Ltd, chats with DT and shared his entire channel plans.
DT: What were the major challenges for your company? How do you fight those challenges?
Mr. Bijoy: Of course the major challenge for the overall market was the Demonetisation phase, the JIO launch and the VAT to GST transition phase. The business had taken a lot of bruises in 2017 which of course our team fought bravely to overcome. This year has been a great learning for us as a team since everyone needed to be on their toes to grab whatever business we could as overall business was hit. New ideas and innovative marketing was required along with the basics to extract business during this time.
DT: How GST changed your business affair in year 2017? What were your preparation to adopt this biggest tax reform?
Mr. Bijoy: GST was a huge change that happened in India tax history and moreover was a difficult time to do business due to the ongoing confusions and the lack of correct information passed. Atleast a couple of business months were lost in that transition. But in the hope for better future. We have supported our partners overall with the GST loss they might face on their stocks plus after GST we were one of the earliest to revise the prices and get the channel price structure streamlined.
DT: What's your channel strength currently in India? How do you plan to boost channel strength in year 2018?
Mr. Bijoy: Channel has been an integral part of our growth in India and we are always striving to get deeper to directly connect to our dealers, retailers etc. We already run the VIP program for the resellers who wish to work together with TP-Link closely by providing better price, better Service support and better margins on our products. In 2018 we will reach to more ISP’s and Retail counters as a marketing initiative those who face the End customer every day.
DT: How do you assure your customer excellent service support? What are your investment plan to enhance service support infrastructure to cover entire India?
Mr. Bijoy: We at TP-Link always want to have a reliable service from our part to the customer hence we have double our checkpoints in our focus cities for more customer to reach us easily. Also for the Technical support we have increased the tech support team by 30% more for customer to access us easily.
DT: What will be your key Go-To-Market Strategy for year 2018?
Mr. Bijoy: Partner reach in depth of the channel has been our focus this year as well and we wish to continue it in 2018 too. The networking market is still in its developing stage and with JIO entering the data market the speed of increase has been tremendous due to the competition. Hence in 2018 we expect a good requirement generation which would need us to reach out to maximum partners across
DT: What will be major products you will be launching in year 2018?
Mr. Bijoy: We are entering into the Smart Home segment with some good products to showcase. In 2017 we had launched products like the Deco M5 (Whole home WiFi Solution), the Smart Plug, Smart Bulb etc. We would be enhancing the same this year too and moving towards the Smart Home through WiFi solutions.
