Plustek to appoint 24 Regional Distis soon

As India opens up a huge market with a billion-plus population, vendors of all size and shape in the IT space are making a beeline to make investments. Plustek, a Taiwan-based Image Solutions company, is also in the race to make a dent in the Indian market.

Recently, VARIndia met Karen Ku, Vice General Manager, Marketing & Sales Department, President Room, Plustek to know their strategy.

Plustek operates under three business units. One is photo film management solution. Another is document management solution, under which there are three product categories – one is document scanning; another is book scanning; and last but not the least is mobile scanning solution. Besides, Plustek has business card readers/scanners. And finally, the company has communication products, which again have three categories of products–– one is IP CAMs for surveillance; the second is videoconferencing products; and yet another are proxy servers.

Asked about the positioning of Plustek products in the Indian market, Karen says, “India is the fastest-growing market. We think our product is suitable for this market in terms of technology and price. We are also thinking of how to revamp the operations in India.”

According to her, Plustek wants to set up a strong channel base in India. She adds, “We want to have 24 regional distributors across the country. They will have their retailers, resellers. The target is that by 2009 we will have 3,000 resellers.” At present, the number of partners is 350–400. In order to support the products, the company will have local RMA centres in four cities, i.e., Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata and the first centre to come up is in Delhi.

The film scanning market is just at the nascent stage today, but it will be a big market in the near future because there must be millions of films in the market and the people will surely want to digitalize these films. “Our film scanner is very powerful. This kind of product is not available with most of the leading vendors of scanners in India. Besides, burgeoning paper document has emerged to be a very big issue and digitization is the only option to manage the documents,” she adds. Apart from this innovative product, the book scanning market will emerge as equally big market in future. According to Karen, the company focusses equally on all the three categories of products.

Recently, Plustek has launched Plustek SmartOffice PS252 in the market. This product is a huge success in the US market. Karen maintains, “We hope in India it will be a big story as well. Though the price is yet to be decided upon, the product has the capability of duplex and simplex colour scanning. With a scanning speed of 25ppm/25IPM, it has high-end OCR/BCR application. It can convert documents into searchable PDF files with one touch. It does not require any uptime for warming.” The company is also providing a carry bag along with the product. Our target is to address the lawyers, company secretaries, small libraries, archiving departments, accountants, etc. In order to support the positioning of products, Plustek along with Telexcell is making all the required marketing activities including eDM, road shows, etc. The second product, which has been introduced in the Indian market recently, is Plustek OpticBook 3600. With built-in SEE Technology (patent pending), it is a book scanner. It has high-capacity OCR.

Karen maintains, “We want to develop our distributors. We want to invest on road shows, seminars, media campaigns, incentivization programmes, etc. All the regional distributors will remain under the nation distributor that is Telexcell Information Systems Ltd. We are also thinking about having the India office by 2007 for interacting with distributors and resellers.”