Released on = September 17, 2006, 11:59 pm

Press Release Author = Mr. Anuj Singhal

Industry = Computers

Press Release Summary = The Taiwan based Optical Disk Drives manufacturer, Liteon
has stopped its replacement support few weeks back. The situation has caused a chaos
among the channel partners and the distributors are set to suffer huge loses.

Speaking to it VAR news, Proprietor, Progen Impex, Satish S Chavadi said, \"It has
been one month since the replacement of Liteon products has stopped. The customer
doesn\'t wait for such a long time for replacement.\"


Press Release Body = The Taiwan based Optical Disk Drives manufacturer, Liteon has
stopped its replacement support few weeks back. The situation has caused a chaos
among the channel partners and the distributors are set to suffer huge loses.

Speaking to it VAR news, Proprietor, Progen Impex, Satish S Chavadi said, \"It has
been one month since the replacement of Liteon products has stopped. The customer
doesn\'t wait for such a long time for replacement.\"

Chavadi added, \"Liteon is not giving replacements neither it has any service centers
and there are no schemes or offers for channel partners and yet the company is
pushing the channel partners via their distributor to ramp up the sales volumes.
Seeing all this we need a strong reason, why we should sell Liteon products in place
of big brands like LG and Samsung, which have long warranty period, service centers
and benefiting offers for channel partners.\"

Supporting Chavadi, Propreiter, R K Impex, Rohit Bajaj said, \"The company is showing
an irresponsible and immature behavior by following such unprofessional practices.
It is our goodwill that is on stake when we convince the customer to buy Liteon
optical drives in place of other drives manufactured by other vendors.\"

The only after product selling service that Liteon provided was the replacement of
its faulty products. Even a basic necessity like service centers has not been
implemented in India since Liteon had maintained its policy that they cannot provide
any spare parts to their distributor or any 3rd party service center. Now, the
condition is that even a buffer has not been provided by Liteon. As a result the
high RMA rate of Liteon makes RMA handling a nightmare for all channel partners.

The role of Mediatech in the whole scenario is identical, as it is also suffering in
terms of revenue, volume and brand image due to Liteon\'s irresponsible behaviors. It
is revealed from the sources that the distributor company is facing major issues, as
Mediatech has invested more than four years and Rs one crore to build a brand image
for Liteon products by advertising, marketing and providing schemes and services to
channel partners.

This distributor company found itself in major trouble when they come to know that
Liteon has changed its policy and from now the replacement will be done by the
buffer stock only, which will be provided by the company within a month time as per
Liteon).

Further investigation into this matter revealed that since the last two years
Mediatech India had been replacing the RMA drives from their new stock in the past
to ensure that channel faced minimum possible RMA problems. But as a result
Mediatech India had accumulated a huge quantity of around 4,000 dead drives which
were replaced by Mediatech under warranty period but for until now they have not
been taken back or replaced by Liteon.

As a result Mediatech is stuck with these dead drives and has incurred a huge loss
of around 50 lacs, which includes original higher purchase price of past and loss on
customs duty and taxes paid on the drives replaced from their stock.

Being stuck in such a throat-clinching situation, Mediatech is following Liteon
instructions to stop replacements from Mediatech\'s fresh stock to avoid facing such
losses again.

itVARnews contacted Liteon several times to reply queries on the above issues.
However, the Liteon representative responsible for Indian market declined to reply
on these issues and responded that as per Liteon policy, they will only make new
product announcements to media and queries of itVARnews cannot be replied by Liteon
IT corporation.

Previously despite the presence of big vendors like Samsung, LG and Sony, Liteon
products had been able to make their mark in the field of optical disk drive
products. Among a few reasons for its growth were good quality, prices and its
product replacement strategy by Mediatech India.

Should Channel support or oppose such manufacturers?


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