Last week, ASUS opened its new Pegasus Store in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, where THE WEEK caught up with Arnold Su, ASUS India Vice President, Consumer & Gaming PC, System Business Group, for a quick chat around the company's retail strategy and a little bit on AI on PCs. Here are the excerpts
Q/ With the likes of Amazon Prime Days and other such deal days becoming more common, how do you see your retail strategy going forward?
A/ In the past few years, ASUS has been an associate sponsor for online sales like Flipkart’s Big Billion Days. I think it’s a mix. If I am a customer, I will still study the market a bit. I will check the specs, reviews, price differences and then make a purchase. I will go to a physical store and then make a purchase decision. The customer may not decide they prefer offline or online, they still want to try it and experience themselves. If a brand doesn’t have an offline presence, the customer may not always feel comfortable to buy something without having tried it themselves.
Q/ How much of a shift or what’s the trend you’re seeing between your customers choosing between offline stores and online portals?
A/ With Covid, we hit a peak of 48 per cent of Indian customers buying PCs online. But since 2022, it's more stabilised around 30-35 per cent. What we see is, if there’s no drastic change, we would expect it to be around the same rate. Currently, only 10 per cent households in India have a PC. China stands at 50 per cent, US and Europe is significantly higher too, considering the Indian growth, we expect it to go from 10 per cent to 20 per cent like many other countries, so we expect to work with all our verticals to be part of that PC growth.
Q/ You said about growing from 10% to 20%, which segment would you say will contribute the most in terms of value?
A/ Pre-Covid, we would say sub-Rs 50,000 segment contributing the most significant, but since then, we have observed buyers ready to splurge a bit more on their PCs. The average buy price of consumer laptops has gone up from Rs 35,000 to 40,000 to somewhere in the range of Rs 55,000-Rs 60,000 now and this is happening for ASUS, too. So, people are ready to spend, if they see the value in it. Also, financing options such as no-cost EMIs also helped this, so you look at the lower upfront cost, so I think this has become a common behaviour for the consumer.
Q/ Other than gaming and content creator zones, what can a person walking into an ASUS store expect compared to a third party store with a lot of other brands products?
A/ You can not only try all our available range, but also book a slot to actually play games on a gaming machine for an hour or two. That’s what we want to offer to the customers, so they know what they are buying according to their needs and don’t regret it later.
Q/ We have seen Copilot+ on your PCs. Can we also expect other LLMs baked into ASUS machines any time soon?
A/ Oh, I think for now we will keep with Microsoft’s Copilot+ and what all it can deliver because the AI market is still in its early stage and then see how it goes from there.
