Dell plans to double the number of its stores in India to 800 this year and increase the proportion of its enterprise sales through channel partners, buoyed by its growing sales and market share in the country.
Dell India’s sales of servers and storage have been rising in the last two years, according to consultancy IDC India, even as rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard have pulled back from the market. IBM has sold part of its server business to Lenovo while Hewlett-Packard has announced that it was splitting into two companies.
“I would not attribute all our growth here to competition pulling back,” Alok Ohrie, president and managing director of Dell India, said. “We’ve created a new go-to-market strategy and that, and our end-to-end offering, has helped more,” he told ET.
Dell India had doubled its number of stores to 400 last year. “Most of our sales in the client space (laptops, desktops, and tablets) come from bricks-andmortar shops — large retail formats. So we are continuing to increase our Dell format stores.
We will double the number of stores this year as well,” Ohrie said.
He said online sales — whether through e-commerce websites or through the company’s own website — were still in the single digit range, as a percentage of sales.
Dell also plans to focus on the enterprise segment. Roughly 35% of Dell’s enterprise sales came from channel partners last year. The firm expects that proportion to increase over the next few years.
“This year we expect channel sales to go up 40-45%. In the near-term, two-three years, we think that number will go up 50%,” Ohrie said. The channel sales has increased Dell’s penetration into smaller accounts in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
All the large technology companies have been increasing their focus on smaller towns and cities to expand in India.
According to research firm Zinnov, small-and-medium businesses are expected to spend more than $11 billion on IT this year.
