Sydney distributor goes walkabout with motherboards, notebooks, cards

One NSW distributor has taken motherboard, notebook and graphics card evangelism into its own hands after the recent demise of the IT Comdex expo.
 
Patrick Cheng, product manager at Protac International Computers Australia, said the Sydney-based distributor had started holding its own hardware seminars in Sydney and Melbourne after the Australian version of the giant global IT Comdex show closed down.

"The organiser has ceased trading since last year. So we decided to do it by ourselves," he said. "We showcased the latest notebook models as well as the motherboards and graphics cards from Elitegroup."

He said the seminars were not the first that Protac had held, but this was the first time the distributor had invited Intel to present its latest products and talk up market trends.

Around 130 dealers came to each event, Cheng said, which were mainly sponsored by vendors Intel, ECS and ATI. Protac had no any important new partnerships in the pipeline but wanted to work more closely with existing partners, he added.
 
The resellers had seemed most interested in trends surrounding Intel's new processors, ATI's new GPU, ECS' new motherboards and Protac's new Excel notebooks, Cheng said.
 
"The breaking news that has been announced by Intel regarding CPU numbering attracted [particular] attention from the audiences," he said.

Protac this year would strive to push new notebooks based on Intel's Centrino mobility-focused bundle and Hyper-Threading Technology, Cheng added.

The company expects sales to strengthen this year. "Yes, actually we are now doing nearly 2,000 notebooks per month and expect to expand to 2,500 per month at the end of 2004," Cheng said.

He said last year had not been a very good year for many distributors, including Protac. A lower selling price per unit had hamstrung turnover in dollar terms, although the quantities sold had increased.

Both notebooks and components were currently selling particularly well, Cheng said.