In Europe, Australia and the US, when you make school stationery kits, there is a set made for USB drives as well, says Ms Manisha Sood, Country Manager and Director, India and SAARC, SanDisk. She says we could see that happening in India as well.
For its part, the flash memory storage major is driving that trend in India through “back to school” programmes with retail chains such as Staples and Croma. “We do special promotions at these chains just before the school session starts,” says Ms Sood, forecasting how, as laptops penetrate schools, the pen drive will become ubiquitous in classrooms as well.
According to her, a 4 GB pen drive has now become an entry-level product, as it just costs Rs 399 today. At the upper end of the scale is the 64 GB pen drive for Rs 6,000.
But it's the memory card in mobile phones where the growth push is coming from, says Ms Sood. “With 150 million handsets sold in one year, it's the mobile category which is seeing the highest growth,” she says, with memory cards for digital cameras not lagging far behind. “Last year, four million digital cameras (were) sold in India,” says Ms Sood, who incidentally says she sold India's first digital camera during her innings with Kodak.
Driving brand recall
Although it's a product that everybody uses — whether in their mobile phones, digital cameras, or tablets — the flash memory card and pen drives tend to be very low-involvement categories with no brand name recall, says Ms Sood. To change that, she describes how SanDisk recently rolled out aggressive audio-visual campaigns as well as activations such as Memory Yatra.
The Memory Yatra is flagged by a SanDisk Memory van that travels through a city and runs contests such as ‘Photograph Your City', themed around its tag line of ‘Capture, Share and Preserve'. Also, within retail stores, SanDisk has also put up Memory Centres, where it educates consumers on storage. “If you say 8 GB or 64 GB memory, it means nothing to the consumer, so we encourage our retail partners to sell the device as capable of storing so many thousand songs or so many hundred movies,” she says. According to Ms Sood, who cites Cyber Media Research data, SanDisk has a 32 per cent share of the India flash cards market in terms of units shipped, followed by Transcend and Kingston.
Clouds on the horizon
Isn't cloud computing a threat to storage device firms such as SanDisk? Ms Sood dismisses that notion. “In a low Internet-penetrated country like India, we won't store everything in cloud — there will be some amount of data stored in the cloud, and some will be stored in the cloudlet in your pocket,” she says, with a wide grin.