IT giants and Distributors meet together at The Fifth Annual DISTREE APAC

Singapore: The fifth Annual DISTREE Asia Pacific (APAC) consumer tech channel event was hosted at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel in Singapore from 8th to 10th November 2017. The event witnessed a gathering of more than 170 senior executives from consumer tech vendors, distributors, retailers and e-tailers. VARINDIA supported this three-day event as the Media Partner.

Top Indian Distributors and Retailers namely Elcom Trading, Fujisan Technologies Ltd., Prabhat Telecoms (India) Ltd., Rashi Peripherals, Redington (India) Ltd., Rhythm Corner Alaknanda, Softech Computers Delhi Ltd., Technocrat Infotech Pvt. Ltd., and Ample were the participants at this year’s DISTREE event. 90 Distributors and 25 Retailers from across the APAC region participated and a total of 209 participants witnessed the event. 

DISTREE APAC provides a business development platform for brands looking to manage, build or launch routes to market for consumer technology products in the fast-growing Asian region. The exhibitors at DISTREE APAC 2017 represented the entire consumer tech product landscape, such as mobile accessories, smart home solutions, components, memory, connected devices and gaming products. This year’s exhibitor base included a wide range of consumer tech device and accessories brands at different stages of channel development.

DISTREE APAC also provides brands that are new to the region with a unique opportunity to broaden their market knowledge and evaluate potential channel partners reaching 20-plus countries. The presence of retailers as well as distributors at this years’ event gave exhibitors a better understanding of the channel structures that exist in major Asian markets. By bringing together great brands with the region’s top channel partners, DISTREE aims to create a win-win business environment for all attendees.

With growing consumer demand and a huge population base, DISTREE APAC provided the ultimate channel development platform for tech brands. The 3 days of meetings offered numerous opportunities to find new business opportunities, catching up on the latest channel initiatives and discover new ideas. More than 600 pre-scheduled one-on-one meetings were organised at DISTREE APAC using the event’s powerful web platform.

The popular ‘60 Seconds to Convince Awards’ gave the exhibitors the chance to deliver a one-minute pitch for their latest products. Live voting determined the winners in three categories - Best Product Design, Best Product Innovation and Best Presentation. Bookeen picked up the ‘Best Product Design’ award for its SAGA e-Reader and the ‘Best Presentation’ award for its highly entertaining product pitch. The ‘Best Product Innovation’ award was bagged by Wonew for its Intelligent Selfie Stick.

The Keynotes sessions included topics like virtual reality (VR), distributor transformation and consumer behaviour. A new APAC Market Snapshots session was introduced where distributors gave updates on business conditions and market trends in specific countries, with presentations from Anyware from Australia, Rashi Peripherals from India and Leader Radio Tech from Hong Kong.

Creating an opportunity for channel leaders across the Asia-Pacific region to meet with their existing suppliers and prospective vendors, the event primarily focused on the consumer channel for ICT Lifestyle products and bringing together senior distribution executives from across South East Asia and Oceania as well as a number of other key Asian markets.

DISTREE APAC 2017 thus created a powerful networking platform that allowed both exhibitors and delegates to build in-depth relationships and focus on new business development opportunities.

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Christophe Painvin, Executive Director – DISTREE Events
We launched DISTREE events 5 years ago. In fact we have been organising events for last 15 years all around the world. We created B2B events because we want to mix together with distributors and brands. In fact we want to accelerate the development of brands who want to invest in market and want to increase the distributor channel in different markets. So for brands, DISTREE events are a real opportunity to meet different distributors across the region and to test the products for future customer and to find some new channel. During our DISTREE events, we are trying to accelerate our presence and raise solutions for brand to target the new market.

We are focused on innovative projects and new products. This will ensure new projects for the region and also products for the IT sector. From this year’s event, we are looking for good distributors whom we can associate with sellers. This year 17 retailers and 74 distributors have participated and in total we have 209 attendees from 18 different countries this year.

We however do not have any plans to organize any such events in India market and so have invited some distributors and retailers from India. Maybe later if brands want to go to India directly, we will help to find some new distributors and maybe organise events there. For the moment we don’t have any plan.

A distributor by attending our event can drive several benefits - like during the 2 day event we can make more than 23 different plans for brands to innovate and help in establishing their identity. So they can find some new projects for the market. Everybody here is looking for business and distributors. So we are well wishers for brands and also the business solution for the distributors.

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Paresh Gathani, Director – Fujisan Technologies
Our current focus for the India market is to look for new partners and opportunities that probably we can bring to our India customers and partners. Our products make good sense to our partners and customers and we look at some business opportunities.

We are into imaging printing solutions and software solutions for enterprise management. We basically offer our products to convert every such organization that still uses a lot of paper to digital content. The business has been growing very fast as far as our imaging products are concerned which are related to converting physical data to digital data. We are looking at growing at a considerable speed and the growth expectations will be met as because we are just through two quarters and two more quarters are there to achieve; so we are expecting a positive result.

Sunil Narang, MD - Elcom Trading Company
There has been a major shift in the way businesses are done. So like earlier we were doing only PCs, but slowly we shifted our focus to mobile portfolio and then to software solution distribution. and of late we have also forayed into surveillance. 

We are planning to have a growth of 5 - 10 % in revenue. But the 10% would not be 10% but actually 20%+. Because of GST, the book value of the revenue has actually gone down by 13%. When earlier the VAT used to be 5%, we were selling our products at 100 rupees and the book value of the products used to be 95 rupees. But now if I am selling products at 100 rupees the book value would be 82 rupees. The major thrust for India is from the Chinese market. Big Chinese vendors are trying to come to India but not too many countries are looking at the same.
 

Pankaj Mirchandani, Director – Sales & Marketing, RCA
This is the second year I am participating at DISTREE and this year I have had the chance to meet with a few vendors and participants. I found the keynote speakers and workshops conducted extremely informative and useful.

Talking about latest trends, Personal Health Trackers and Wireless Charging are some of the new trends we are witnessing in our sector. Being in the Tech Industry for more than 25 years, we keep ourselves abreast with the latest technological trends and add to the catalogue as per market trends. When we look into the current market landscape, a lot of vendors are extremely serious, but most of them however position themselves as ‘luxury brands’, thereby missing a large chunk of the market

Despite all the changes like Demonetization & GST roll out, we will register a healthy double digit growth.
 

Soong-EN Yong, Manager, Regional Sales – APAC, PanzerGlass
Panzer is a Danish company and was started in 2013. It is a focused company since we only make tempered glass, unlike many of the other brands that also covers cables, power banks cases etc.

We have PanzerGlass and Cristiano Ronaldo combined products.  So in this series we may have 10 tempered glasses and phone back casing like the usual leather case and other cases.

With respect to the India market, we are looking for the right distributer and retailers as it might not be very easy to start selling tempered glass there as we are targeting the premium segment market. So we would be selling at Apple premium store, Samsung stores etc. We are targeting the high value customers where the value and the quality give good experience.

Rajesh Goenka, Vice President, Sales and Marketing - Rashi Peripherals
The PC market in India is growing by leaps and bounds and this is resulting in demand for technology and peripherals & accessories also growing. 

Talking about new technology, the wireless Bluetooth is of course a fundamental technology but of course lots of incremental features are in it which is creating a revolution in the consumer market. 

For last 10 years, we have had a record growth of 25% and even in this year we will continue to grow. So when the organisation is growing, the revenue size keeps growing and maintaining the high performance is important. But still we are able to manage the pace. And our average growth is still 2x than current India demand. We are growing at 2 times more as compared to the country growth.

Asif Khan, Director – Technocrat Infotech
This is the first time we are participating at DISTREE. The expectation to meet new vendors, view the latest products and futuristic information about technology are the major factors why we look at distributing in such events. The workshops are very informative as it helps to understand market trend and dynamics.

GfK and Content help us in better understanding about business trends, like growth in Gaming, Wearable and Smartphone give us direction to more focus on growing products. As we are in distribution, our business does not get directly impacted by demonetization. But generally I see vendors are very much interested and serious about the India business. For our business, we are expecting a growth of 10 - 15%. The roadmap for our business would be to expand in new product range and ink more brand tie-ups.
 

Vishwamani Tiwari, Chairman – Prabhat Telecoms (India)
We have seen a huge change in global product development patterns and a lot of more innovative products are seen coming to the market. IOT is becoming a part and parcel of new development bringing Telecom and RF in every part of development. Being a core telecom company, we have been getting actively involved to capture new technology and products and looking to taking it to mass level in our geography.

Prabhat Telecoms has a bright future and has made steady progress in the past 10 years. Our Turnover and PAT (Profit after tax) are improving at a rate of 15% on a year to year basis. In the next one year we are looking to strengthen our network not just in India but also in international countries like Asia, Africa and Europe. We are also looking forward to leveraging the vast pool of skilled and young labour force in India by assembling and manufacturing products in India and exporting it to other potential markets.

Alton Pereira, Senior Project Manager - Promate
The main thing about our electronic product is its auto voltage regulator in which if you connect any automatic device it will automatically regulate the voltage for that device. Other than that we have a speaker called Cyclone that mainly works on sound vibrations; so you can stick it up on any surface and create a speaker out of that surface which means the surface itself turns into speaker.

Currently we have not ventured into Indian market because there is cut throat competition especially the race we see with mobile accessories. We however are looking at ways into foraying into the Indian market, but that would be mainly into the e-commerce market.