PC market leader Dell, which lost out on the Tamil Nadu laptop order in the initial run, hopes to make it up in the future.
The Tamil Nadu Government plans to distribute 68 lakh laptops, free of cost, to students of Government and State-aided schools and colleges across Tamil Nadu, in the next five years.
The state-run Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot) had last year floated a global tender for procuring 9.12 lakh laptops in the first phase of the scheme. The vendors who have bagged the order include Lenovo (which gave the lowest bid), Acer and HCL Infosystems.
The price per unit is around Rs 14,000/unit. Distribution of laptops for the first phase has to be completed in the next two quarters.
“The commercials did not work out for us but we hope to be a part of the scheme in future,” said Mr Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, Managing Director and CEO, Dell India, which had also bid for the project.
According to Gartner estimates, Dell has the top market share in the PC segment in the country at 15.5 per cent (December 2011 quarter), followed by Lenovo (13.1 per cent), HP (12.4 per cent) and Acer (12.1 per cent).
Dell has a factory in Chennai with exports of 2 million units. It also has a facility in Coimbatore; another facility is coming up here at an SEZ. The company employs nearly 5,000 employees in Tamil Nadu.
Dell's second R&D centre in India will be in Chennai – through the acquisition of Force 10, a storage networking company.
Mr Lakshminarayanan spoke on the sidelines of a conference on entrepreneurship and incubation organised by ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu and Nasscom.
