Alex Li was serving as the worldwide product head for Lenovo in Taiwan early this year when he received a call from his boss, Shao Peng, Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets. Peng was looking for a capable hand to drive growth and restructure the channel mode of business in India, a key market for Lenovo. “He just asked me to go to India and a few weeks later, here I was,” says Li. He visited India for the first time just last year.
China and India both operate with channel partners comprising distributors and retail stores. In China, Lenovo has a six-tier structure. For India, the company has instituted a three-tier model consisting of four national distributors at the top who serve the seven regions India is split into. To address conflict of interest among distributors, as a rule not more than three Tier 1 distributors are allotted to a specified region. “We have done this so that distributors can have a larger overall share of the market and it builds a sustained interest among them in selling Lenovo products,” says Yathindra Nath, Director – consumer & SMB sales & distribution, Lenovo India. “Earlier the distribution was too fragmented and no one had a sizeable share of the market,” he adds.
(This story appears in the 22 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Article is Good.
on Sep 7, 2010Pretty informative. Impressed.
on Jan 15, 2010