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Western Digital ties up with Servex

With the impending opening of Servex's office in India, the marketing agreement will be transferred to Servex (India).

The Fortune 500 company, with over $5 billion in revenues worldwide, focuses on the data storage market and electronics design and asset management.

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Western Digital is the market leader in desktop EIDE drives by unit volumes. Of a worldwide market share of about 20 per cent in disk drives, about 5 per cent come from SCSI drives and 2-3 per cent from disk drives for portable systems.

The rest is from their desktop market. Of this about 80 per cent of the revenues are from the top 50 customers which include industry leaders such as Compaq, IBM, Dell and even other drives manufacturers such as Seagate.

Hafeez Khawaja, sales manager for West Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent for Western Digital (UK) said: "We became market leaders in the desktop segment in Europe in Q4 1997 and are second worldwide. We aim to become the number one player within the next year.''

The fault rates in Western Digital's hard drives have been consistently less than 1 per cent and as low as 0.28 per cent in the West Asian market.

"When any of our customers have a problem with our drives, the dealer will immediately reimburse the customer (on prevailing rates) because when he sends the faulty drive to our office he will immediately be credited for it. This allows us to have an extremely fast response time to complaints. The customer can, of course opt for a new drive,'' said Khawaja.

"We are predominantly targeting the mid-range enterprise market in India. We expect to garner a 25 per cent market share here and are looking to sell at least 1,500 units in the first year. Eventually we will be looking at a market share of about 35 per cent,'' he said.

Questioned on the higher pricing of Western Digital's drives at $400-500 a piece, Khawaja said: "You cannot compare apples with oranges. Our USP is quality, which is more than qualified by our fault rate. Our higher price is offset by the value innovation, reliability and predictability associated with our products.

"Our customers also value the execution and inventory/logistics management offered by WD which is why our share in the world market has been consistently increasing.''

- Compiled from the Indian media

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