Asus targets ‘Bharat’, creators in aim to sell 2 million laptops annually by 2030

In an interview with Mint, Arnold Su, vice-president of consumer and gaming at Asus India, said the company’s targeted surge in sales is due to the way PCs' usage is concentrated across regions.

“In all of the seven tier-one cities, we see almost 40% of the people with a laptop or desktop in some form. This is not true for the hinterlands. For instance, in distant tier-III towns and beyond, less than 4% of the demographic likely have laptops. While many there were exposed to the internet via mobile to begin with, the pandemic gave a massive fillip that remote work cannot happen on phones. Now, we’re targeting this to both expand our portfolio, and the places that we are present in," Su said.

The Taiwan-headquartered brand counts India as its third-largest market in the world, even though Su maintains that India is “still not a mature market in terms of sales and PC adoption, but it can be in the near term."

The company’s bullish stance has seen it expand its presence to 321 exclusive stores and over 4,200 stores across multi-brand outlets—across 602 districts. It is seeing a revival of sales, too; Asus was the second-fastest growing PC brand in India in the first six months of this year, growing 11% year-on-year, as compared with the overall market’s 6% year-on-year growth in PC sales.

“For example, in the state of West Bengal, we used to see that a majority of buyers at our stores in Kolkata, the state’s capital, would come from various districts, and not from the metro city itself. Now, we’ve set-up our exclusive stores across districts such as Asansol and Durgapur, which draw in buyers from adjoining areas in under-penetrated markets," Su said.

Asus in India

Asus’ journey in India has been on a steady rise, where it almost matched or significantly outpaced the growth of the overall PC industry in four out of the past five years. In the first six months of this year, Asus’ sales grew 11%, while overall PC sales rose 6%. It is only in the past year that Asus registered an 8% decline in sales as opposed to a 4% growth of the market, a factor that analysts pegged as inventory management decisions by Asus’ Taiwan headquarters.

Industry analysts concurred at Asus’ growing presence in India, attributing it to multiple factors. Bharath Shenoy, principal analyst for personal computers at market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) India said much of its growth is attributable to its offline presence.

“Until the covid-19 pandemic, Asus was a niche user-focused brand that largely sold online. Since 2020, it began expanding its physical store footprint to make its products available across large-format multi-brand outlets such as Reliance Digital, Tata Croma and others," Shenoy said. "Its own exclusive stores have also doubled over the past two years, and it diversified its laptops to also focus on content creators with devices at lower price points. All of this has helped it to largely sustain a strong growth pace over the past five years, and it still remains poised for steady growth."

Shenoy added that Asus’ optimistic growth projection is justified as it has only started focusing on commercial PC shipments starting this year. “At this moment, Asus is shipping close to 100,000 laptops to government and enterprise channels, which is less than 10% of its annual sales. It is also setting-up teams for commercial PC distributions, and with a much larger price bracket that it now caters to, a strong growth pace is not out of the question," he said.

All of this is coming even as demand for Microsoft-certified ‘Copilot-Plus’ AI PCs have not made a big impact on Asus as yet. “That is not a surprise; hardware development always precedes software. As a result, our current market share of AI PC sales is hardly about 6-7% of our overall India sales. By next year, we expect more software and use case development to take place, as a result of which our AI PC sales is likely to hit 15% by end-2026," Su said.