'Aim to ensure every pincode & village have Tata Sky dealers'

With a presence in six lakh villages supported by 2,10,000 dealers nationwide, Tata Sky today said it aims at ensuring that every pin code and village should have their dealers.
"Our aim is to ensure that every pincode and village should have Tata Sky dealers. In urban areas we wish to have multiple dealers and in rural areas, at least one. We have presence in six lakh villages supported by 2,10,000 dealers in the country," Tata Sky Chief Sales Officer Saleem Shaikh told PTI here.
In Karnataka, Tata Sky aims to reach 4,500 towns, up from 2,500, by this fiscal end, he said.

Shaikh said the company has 10,000 dealer outlets through local shops in the state, with a 40 per cent market share in rural areas and 25 per cent in urban areas.
He said Tata Sky sees big opportunities in helping the cause of digitisation in the southern market and further consolidates the market position. "At present, the service brings brings in 95 per cent of channels to home subscribers."
The deadline for digitisation of Phase-III is December 2015, with focus on South India, covering 1,200 towns,he said.

Asked about the competition from Sun TV down south,Shaikh said rather than focusing on converting viewers from Sun TV to Tata Sky, the company was eyeing converting them from analogue to DTH.

"The moment we do that, naturally, the customer comes to us. The company has stopped looking at competition in DTH two years back," he said.
On difficulties in achieving targets in rural areas, Shaikh said it is extremely difficult to penetrate these areas because of lack of dealers. To tide over this problem, "we will identify repair workshop operators for fridge and other electronic goods and give them training to later make them part of our dealer network."
Shaikh claimed Tata Sky is the fastest growing DTH brand in the last two to three years, while the sector is growing at an average of 11-12 per cent.

The total digitised market size in India is 120 million as of 2014 with 50 million DTH Set Top Boxes (STB), with the remaining 70 million STBs installed by MSOs (Multi System Operators), he said.