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Speaking to it VAR news, Proprietor, Progen Impex, Satish S Chavadi said, "It hasbeen one month since the replacement of Liteon products has stopped. The customerdoesn't wait for such a long time for replacement."
Chavadi added, "Liteon is not giving replacements neither it has any service centersand there are no schemes or offers for channel partners and yet the company ispushing the channel partners via their distributor to ramp up the sales volumes.Seeing all this we need a strong reason, why we should sell Liteon products in placeof big brands like LG and Samsung, which have long warranty period, service centersand benefiting offers for channel partners."
Supporting Chavadi, Propreiter, R K Impex, Rohit Bajaj said, "The company is showingan irresponsible and immature behavior by following such unprofessional practices.It is our goodwill that is on stake when we convince the customer to buy Liteonoptical drives in place of other drives manufactured by other vendors."
The only after product selling service that Liteon provided was the replacement ofits faulty products. Even a basic necessity like service centers has not beenimplemented in India since Liteon had maintained its policy that they cannot provideany spare parts to their distributor or any 3rd party service center. Now, thecondition is that even a buffer has not been provided by Liteon. As a result thehigh RMA rate of Liteon makes RMA handling a nightmare for all channel partners.
The role of Mediatech in the whole scenario is identical, as it is also suffering interms of revenue, volume and brand image due to Liteon's irresponsible behaviors. Itis revealed from the sources that the distributor company is facing major issues, asMediatech has invested more than four years and Rs one crore to build a brand imagefor Liteon products by advertising, marketing and providing schemes and services tochannel partners.
This distributor company found itself in major trouble when they come to know thatLiteon has changed its policy and from now the replacement will be done by thebuffer stock only, which will be provided by the company within a month time as perLiteon).
Further investigation into this matter revealed that since the last two yearsMediatech India had been replacing the RMA drives from their new stock in the pastto ensure that channel faced minimum possible RMA problems. But as a resultMediatech India had accumulated a huge quantity of around 4,000 dead drives whichwere replaced by Mediatech under warranty period but for until now they have notbeen taken back or replaced by Liteon.
As a result Mediatech is stuck with these dead drives and has incurred a huge lossof around 50 lacs, which includes original higher purchase price of past and loss oncustoms duty and taxes paid on the drives replaced from their stock.
Being stuck in such a throat-clinching situation, Mediatech is following Liteoninstructions to stop replacements from Mediatech's fresh stock to avoid facing suchlosses again.
itVARnews contacted Liteon several times to reply queries on the above issues.However, the Liteon representative responsible for Indian market declined to replyon these issues and responded that as per Liteon policy, they will only make newproduct announcements to media and queries of itVARnews cannot be replied by LiteonIT corporation.
Previously despite the presence of big vendors like Samsung, LG and Sony, Liteonproducts had been able to make their mark in the field of optical disk driveproducts. Among a few reasons for its growth were good quality, prices and itsproduct replacement strategy by Mediatech India.
Should Channel support or oppose such manufacturers?
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