ASUSTek to increase local channel

Taiwanese hardware vendor ASUSTek Computer is ramping up in Australia, opening an office locally and outlining plans to expand its distribution channel.

Chiang Lim, sales manager for Australia and New Zealand in ASUS' Asia-Pacific sales and marketing group, said the company was opening an office in Sydney and planned to increase the ranks of its local distributors to sell its business products.

The company already works with several Australian partners, including Cassa, Ingram Micro and Synnex. Synnex began distributing ASUS motherboards in July, Lim said. 'We want to integrate with local partners and players for our 'solution' products,' he said.

Lim said the company would probably announce a new distributor early 2004, but had not yet decided who to sign. The vendor is also considering signing an Australian service provider to offer third-party support to end-users locally for its product range.

'This is a new start for us and for ASUS in Australia. We want to be a market leader in the near future and be very aggressive in the market here in 2004,' he said.

Lim said ASUS expected notebooks in particular to grow strongly. The company believes one of its most popular lines is its ATI RADEON-powered graphics cards portfolio.

ASUS offers motherboards supporting AMD's Opteron 64-bit processor for servers and Athlon 64 processor for 32-bit-compatible 64-bit computing on the desktop.

The company also makes barebones desktops, notebooks, IA devices, servers, broadband modems, wireless hardware, optical drives and networking devices.