Zenith Offers 100mhz Pentium Colour Pc At Rs 39,900

Zenith Computers, the countrys fourth largest PC company, has decided to take the MNC brands head on by offering a 100 mhz Pentium colour PC at Rs 39,900.

The company has positioned its `One Up PC alongside the top three brands- HCLs `Infiniti, PCLs `Thoroughbred and Wipro Acers `Acermate.

This way it has intensified the PC price war among domestic and MNC brands, which was earlier restricted only to lower segment of the market, and taking it to premium products.

The machine comes with a 8 MB RAM, one gigabyte (GB) hard disk and a pre-loaded PC DOS 7.0, MS DOS version 6.0, Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 and Unix. It also has a pre-installed software Nortons anti-virus kit and a universal serial bus port on motherboard on Pentium PC.

 

In a significant revision of its earlier strategy, the company plans to move out of the low-end segment of the market and concentrate solely on the `One up PC, around 13,000 of which the company aims to sell by March this year.

Explaining how Zenith could offer the machine at such a low price, Raj Saraf, chairman and managing director of the company, said the key to the offering is Zeniths procurement policy.

Components have been sourced from the same vendors like Acer, Mitac, FIC who supply to leading multinational brands like Compaq, IBM, Digital and Hewlett-Packard. Each and every part of the PC is imported. The machines are being assembled in Zeniths plants at Goa and Navi Mumbai. We believe that many buyers would no longer pay a 40 to 50 per cent premium for a MNC brand name, Saraf pointed out.

He added: Our mission is to bring the latest quality PC globally to India at prices which are two-thirds that of equivalent MNC systems in India.

The company has also adopted the direct marketing method to reach its customers. This way we have been able to cut down the margin to each and every layer of the distribution system, Saraf said.

Most of the leading computer manufacturers supply their brands through a number of channels or distributors or authorised resellers. This introduces a markup at each level of the distribution and supply network, thereby raising prices, he said.

By supplying machines to customers directly, we will be able to offer the product at a much lower price, Saraf claimed.

The Mumbai-based Zenith Computers reported sales of Rs 120 crore and delivered 23,000 PCs last year. This year, it hopes to cross Rs 160 crore in revenues.