Ingram Micro plans to offer a certification program for assemblers of unbranded PCs in the Asia-Pacific region. The move follows the California-based distribution company's introduction of branded components for PCs under the Vesta name.
The Ingram certified PCs program is intended to offer PC customers a mark of quality assurance and will be given to assemblers who build PCs using Vesta-branded components, such as motherboards, CD-ROM drives, keyboards, mice, speakers and cabinets, according to Nagarajan Yegna Prasad, chief operating officer of Ingram Micro India, Ingram Micro's Indian subsidiary.
"We will insist that the assemblers that want our certification use only Vesta building blocks, except for the hard disk drives and CPUs (central processing units)," he said. "While they can use a hard disk drive of their choice, the CPU will have to be from Intel, as the Vesta building blocks only support the Intel architecture." The program is likely to be rolled out in the region by the second quarter of next year.
The key attraction for Ingram Micro in markets like India and China is the large number of PC assemblers who currently build PCs with components bought from multiple sources. "We will be able to compete on price for the features we offer with the components currently used by the assemblers, because we can leverage on our economics of volume sourcing and global consolidation," said Prasad.
Assembled, unbranded PCs accounted for about 57 per cent of total shipments of 1.1 million PCs last year in India, according to market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) India. IDC is a unit of IDG News Service's parent company, International Data Group.