Supertron joins the laptop price war

The Rs 100 crore Supertron Electronics Ltd (SEL) has launched two notepads at Rs 54,000 and Rs 61,000 each, which, according to the company, is the cheapest laptops available at the moment.

"We expect to sell around 1,600 note pads in the next one year," explained V K Bahndari, managing director, SEL. "These are at least 10 per cent cheaper than the notepads that are available in the market," he added.

"The notepad market in India is growing at a large 40 per cent per annum and at present stands at around 6,000 note pads a year. With prices of notepads falling sharply the demand is expected to grow in the near future," he said.

SEL assembles the notepads at its plant in Kolkata.

"We import the liquid crystal display (LCD) screen and the mother board and assemble rest components in India, thus, allowing our customers to reap the benefit of price advantage we are able to offer as a result of our tie-up with Intel and other Mercury mother board manufacturer," he said.

The company today also launched two models of personal computers installed with Pentium IV central processing units (CPU), which are priced at Rs 25,000 each.

"With around 11 years of experience as bulk traders of motherboard, hard drive and other computer accessories, we have the advantage of price which we pass on to our consumers," he added.