Dell expects consumer segment to drive PC business growth in India

Amid a positive business environment and rising consumer spend, technology major Dell expects the consumer segment to drive the growth of its PC business in India. According to the company, another factor which is pushing its growth in the consumer segment is the consumption of online video screening services provided by players such as Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime.

"In the last 6-8 months, with the entry of Neflix and Amazon prime, entertainment has been customised. So, a lot of people are doing refresh as the laptop has emerged as the most preferred medium to watch shows coming in these platforms," said P Krishnakumar, senior VP & GM (consumer & small business) of Dell EMC. “With increased battery life and good screen resolution, we are seeing increasing demand for laptops.”

There are a little over 70 million users for online video streaming services in India with home-grown Hotstar leading the show, while rivals Netflix and Amazon continue to report strong growth.  

This has created a strong demand in tier-I cities, he said, as users are seen refreshing their old notebooks with newer ones.  

Besides, implementation of GST has opened up a new revenue stream in the consumer line for Dell. "Earlier, science students used to buy PCs. But, now with implementation of GST, commerce students have also started buying PCs and notebooks for learning accounting software," Krishnakumar said. Dell, which has recently introduced a new series of gaming PC, is also witnessing the sound response to these new variants.

To drive future growth, Dell is also planning to increase its exclusive store count to 800 by the end of this fiscal from the present level of 670. "This is primarily because we have seen that the cities where we have exclusive stores, our sales growth is more," he added.

In the first quarter of this calendar year, Indian PC shipments recorded a rise of 8.2 per cent year-on-year (YoY) at 2.35 million units, an IDC report said. Within this, the consumer PC market posted a growth of 3.2 per cent at 1.08 million units. Krishnakumar said the company is expected the consumer segment to grow well above the industry average at high single digit in the ongoing financial year.

In the January to March period of 2018, HP was leading in the overall PC market in India with a share of 28.6 per cent followed by Dell with 23.2 per cent. Chinese technology major Lenovo was in the third spot with a share of 21.7 per cent during that period.

According to IDC, small enterprises will be one of the major drivers of sales growth this year. "In last 18 months, we see faster adoption of technology by SMBs due to demonetisation and GST. Keeping this in mind, we have launched our first SMB solution centre in Bengaluru to showcase solutions to small businesses," Krishnakumar said.

The company is also targeting SME clusters where the technology adoption is lower to push up sales growth. The company said that it is targeting SME clusters such as foundry and textile to grow its pie in the SME segment.