Hitachi's local office plans to continue regional road shows covering cities and smaller towns. According to Sostin, there is always a visible effect from those events which usually appears in a month or two.

For its second-level partners, Hitachi introduced a special program which provides access to direct vendor rebates, marketing funds and early product samples. There are about 15 program participants in Russia. About ten of them are desktop PC assemblers, and a few are notebook PC and server manufacturers including Aquarius and Kraftway. Hitachi expects to attract more partners to this program next year.

Partner interaction is the main duty of local representatives. At the company level Hitachi GST breaks its sales into channel and original equipment manufacturers. All hard drives coming to Russian systems assemblers are accounted as channel sales because they first pass to a distributor.

There are two distributors who serve Hitachi in Russia -- Asbis and Elco. Hitachi intends to keep relations with these two companies in the future and is not planning to add any new first-level partners as long as growth targets are met. According to Frapard there are only eight distributors for Hitachi hard drives in the EMEA region.