Manisha Sood
Country Manager - India & SAARC
SanDisk Corporation
What makes SanDisk a premium brand?
SanDisk is the inventor and co-inventor of many memory cards and pen drives. If you analyze our philosophy, we are an innovation-driven company and this is what keeps us always at the forefront. We are also very particular with the quality of our products. We design our own controllers and this along with the raw flash (for which we have a joint collaboration with Toshiba for this). We come out with one of the best memory products in the industry. We heavily depend on R&D for designing our products and we spend close-to 10% of our revenue on all the research that goes into making of our products. Our R&D facility in Bangalore works closely with the global team in this regard.
How do you empower your channel partners?
We are a channel-friendly company. Right from the day one, we have made sure our channel partners go through extensive training sessions and equip themselves with the latest technology know-how. We remember conducting channel programmes in 15 cities and educating more than 3,000 resellers on the flash memory products. In India, SanDisk has signed up three national distributors - HCL, Ingram Micro and Rashi Peripherals. These national distributors sell our products to the city distributors, who further down the line, sell it to the retailers. So, SanDisk has these three levels of distribution system to sell its products in the Indian market.
What makes SanDisk successful in the channel community?
The channel has played an impactful role in the growth and consolidation of the flash memory market in the country. We try to keep our interaction with our partners alive and ensure our accessibility to them whenever they need any kind of assistance, whether in terms of marketing or any new product feature enquiry. Our commitment towards them makes us take up different activities from time to time that are of keen interest to them.
What kind of channel initiatives SanDisk takes up?
To keep our channel engaged and informed and also to reinforce our presence, SanDisk conducted a unique channel initiative programme during February last year called “SanDisk Memory Yatra”, coinciding with some of the festivals. Since our products sell more in the B- & C-class towns, we took this concept there. This Yatra began in Jaipur around the festival of Holi and moved on to Chandigarh during Baisakhi, to Kerala during Onam and to Pune and Hyderabad on Ganesh Chaturthi.
