Despite the importance, Hitachi did not have a local representative office until this August. The company should have had sufficient production facilities for a more aggressive market approach, said Nicolas Frapard, Hitachi's channel manager for EMEA. Those have become available only recently after a major investment in China.
Hitachi settled in Russia three months ago and, according to Frapard, and the company's vision of strategy execution has been adjusted.
The changes involved logistics planning as Russia's delivery infrastructure is not at the same level with the rest of Europe. The products come to market with a bigger time lag, so Hitachi has to plan its Russia shipments well in advance compared to other countries. Another change involves regional expansion. Hitachi's products are well presented in Moscow and Saint Petersburg but much worse in other regions.
In order to increase its brand awareness across Russia and establish relations with regional partners and local media, Hitachi GST recently went on a road show to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Krasnodar, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk.
The trip helped the company generate an increasing wave of demand, said Andrey Sostin, Hitachi's channel manager for Russia. After interviews with local companies Hitachi also increased shipments of its popular 80-gigabyte hard drives to Russia which has a low price advantage.
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.