'Lots of YouTubers and influencers use a phone that can do lots of things, but if you need to do heavy editing or proper editing, you will still come back to a proper laptop setup.'
ASUS, the Taiwanese computer hardware and electronics giant, aims to be the top laptop brand in India.
Indian customers must regard the company as a home brand, said Arnold Su, vice-president, consumer & gaming PCs, ASUS India.
Su, in a video interview with Pranjal Sharma/Business Standard, spoke about laptops, the creator economy and artificial intelligence personal computer (AI PC).
You're a global company which has been in India for 20 years. How has been the journey?
It's a great journey. That's why I'm here for 14 years and I also got Aadhaar card now.
Before I came to India, we studied papers and we talked about GDP and GDP per capita.
You look at India in a different angle but then I realised that India is not just about Mumbai and Delhi.
India is about all the districts and talukas. So then we decided that our strategy should be to be accessible to people living outside metro cities.
As a leader, if I sit in an office and ask my team member 'you go there and you go there', nobody will listen to me. So, I have to be there.
I believe ASUS is present in more than 400 districts. It means that you would have travelled to many of these regions. What's your learning?
My first learning is that in India there are lots of IT hubs in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.
Everybody thinks that major business happens in those IT clusters but we realised that end customers are not from Kolkata itself.
We have exclusive stores in Kolkata but when we did a survey and realised that almost 40 per cent of customers are not from Kolkata. They are from Asansol, Midnapur and Durgapur.
We thought, why should customers travel 200 km just to buy a laptop? Then we opened stores in Durgapur, Midnapur, and Asansol and our customers further increased.
When we were planning a product strategy, we thought for metro cities, for example in Mumbai, we should set up stores with all premium products.
We thought if we go to Kolhapur or Solapur, we should lower the segment. We realised that we were wrong.
When we launched a new gaming laptop and decided to deliver it personally to the customer. The first customer was from Varanasi, not Delhi or Mumbai.
The product segmentation shouldn't be by city because customers are everywhere.
What is your most-used product category? You're well known for gaming but you also have laptops for enterprises and professionals.
Gaming is almost 40 per cent of our business in India. But by further breaking down the gaming segment, we realised that lots of customers buy gaming laptops not because they are gamers.
Gaming is the biggest category but we need to categorise -- what is really the user buying the laptop for.
Going forward, what we are going to do is we are going to talk to design schools.
They are our biggest customers -- students come to us and say ‘I want to buy that laptop but I don't like the look. Can you do something about it'? That's next -- we are trying to make our products more creator-oriented.
The creator economy uses powerful mobile devices. How do such devices compete with laptops?
Yes, we do see so but we also see a shift. To be honest, as an industry till 2019 -- before Covid-19, we did see a tough challenge. But after Covid we realised where our strengths are.
I do agree that lots of YouTubers and influencers use a phone that can do lots of things, but if you need to do heavy editing or proper editing, you will still come back to a proper laptop setup.
At this moment, we still don't see mobile immediately replacing us. We consider mobile is still a device that's more to do with content consumption and a personal computer is more like content creation.
What is an AI PC? Every company wants to define it in their own way.
How we look at AI PCs at this moment is how we considered the smartphone 10 years back.
This is also a very big debate internally. Every company has a different definition, even within as we have another definition.
We can define it into three categories: Everyday AI PC, next-level AI PC and advanced AI PC.
When I bought my first smartphone 10 years ago, I used it only for phone calls and SMS. But when things changed, people said I want to own this new technology. I think it's a trend change again.
I think you are sourcing more components in India as part of the Make in India campaign. How do you see that journey for the next few years?
This is our third year of association with Make in India and we are continuously working with our OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).
What we want to see is more key players for parts come to India. Then we will be ready with the end device. We need to source all the key parts.
Do you have a target for the next three or four years for ASUS in India?
Six years ago, we had just 5 or 6 per cent market share with hardly less than a thousand-crore business in India.
Today, we are the number two brand and our market share is between 18 per cent to 20 per cent. We are challenging ourselves to be number one.
How can we make the Indian customer really love ASUS and consider it to be a home brand? That will be our global vision.
We want to bring the latest hardware and AI technology to almost every taluka in India. Yes, this is our ultimate goal.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff
