While international brand like Sony has moved out of the consumer laptop business, other homegrown PC players like HCL and Wipro too have quit the space. This has opened the door for HP India to increase its retail footprints in the consumer space and is looking at banking and retail segments as the next growth engine for its enterprise range of laptop and tablets.
Other than HP, even other smaller PC players like Asus are gearing up to grab the market share with the competition in laptop business shrinking.
Asked what the exit of Sony, HCL and Wipro from laptop meant for companies like HP, Ketan Patel, director-Computing category, printing and Personal Systems, HP India said, “HP being a leader in the PC business in both consumer and commercial and the exit of Sony and other local brands gives as a good opportunity, we are investing more into their space to grab their share.”
The exit of Wipro and HCL from PC business has opened up tremendous opportunities for HP enterprise products. “Earlier, both the Indian players were dominating the banking and retail verticals, but as they moved out, HP is becoming the brand for their choice to fulfill their demands. As these two verticals hold major shares in the computing space, we are aggressively taking over this space with enterprise class of products which we are trying to make it more solution based for these verticals,” he added.
While quoting IDC studies, Patel said, “Sony was commanding close to 13-14% market share in the consumer business, which translates into 1,00,000 units per quarter opportunities for existing PC players, similarly on the commercial side 15-17 percent of market share was with HCL and Wipro. In a nutshell, we see there is a opportunities of 3 lakhs units PC per quarters. Now its up to us, how much we can grab additional share.”
Overall, in India, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer were the top five brands in terms of market share.
To tap these additional opportunities, HP is working on integrated solution approach and looking to add more niche partners for major verticals, other area HP is exploring is PC as a service approach for the enterprise segment. Patel added, “PC as a service is at a very nascent stage, we are working out on the viability of this model in India.”
Overall, the Indian laptop market is on the verge of cannibalization due to tablets and smartphones. Analysts feel, the laptop competition will be further consolidate as more branded players move out. Moreover, due to BIS standardization, parallel import and Gary market is completely wiped out in India and the top five branded players are expected to rule the laptop market.
