Taiwan-based manufacturer and designer of motherboards boards and add-on cards, Micro-Star International (MSI) is embarking on a series of road shows across B & C class cities in India very soon.

This initiative from MSI, dubbed ‘MSI Channel Yatra’, is in accordance with the company’s increased focus on the upcoming markets and aims at covering 18 such cities throughout the country.

Explaining the new focus on smaller cities, Frank Sherap, Country Manager, MSI, said, “We had been focused only in the metros and other bigger cities till now and had never done any road shows in B & C class cities. The result is that we have a strong brand existence in the bigger cities wherein we know our customers and channel in turn knows MSI.”

“With the growth in metros stagnating, the upcountry markets are showing increased sales. As our partners in smaller cities are also growing, we thought it was time we took a look at the smaller cities in the country,” he said.

MSI Channel Yatra has already started its journey from Dehradun where the first road show was held on October 22. Other venues where the road show has already reached are Haldwani, Agra, Surat, and Ahmedabad. By the time the Yatra culminates in the last week of December, it would have covered the following cities -- Hyderabad, Cochin, Thrissur, Coimbatore, Mangalore, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jaipur, Siliguri, Guwahati, Bhuvneswar, Ranchi, Raipur and Indore.

During the road shows, MSI will showcase its complete new range of motherboards based on Intel Platform (especially P35 & G31) and on the AMD platform. Besides, there would be notebooks and VGA cards also showcased during the event. MSI will use this platform to educate partners on the various products which MSI carries; the USP of its product; and also update them about the various propriety technologies that MSI has.

On the ROI that MSI expects from the initiative, Sherap said, “It will be a great knowledge-sharing and awareness-building platform for our channel partners. Through the road shows, we would also get closer to our upcountry partners. It will also give us an opportunity to appoint new partners.”

Sherap expects to cover about 50 of his channel partners in every city where the road show would be held.

“While we would continue to support our partners through regular schemes and product information, we are planning to further enable them to address customers better. To reinforce our service infrastructure, we are setting up more collection centers in the country,” he said.

MSI presently has collection centers in Delhi and Mumbai and plans to set up collection centers in seven more cities by early next year. The potential cities on MSI’s radar for these collection centers are Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad, among others.