Acer India MD warns aggressive E-commerce pricing can hurt brands, calls for stronger local manufacturing

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Harish Kohli, managing director and president of Acer India, warned that selling identical products across e-commerce platforms and offline stores could significantly harm brands. He said price competition on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart often forces companies to discount products unnecessarily, leaving brands vulnerable.

“Any company will die if it sells the same product on Amazon and Flipkart. Leave offline aside, even selling the same product on both platforms is enough to finish you,” Kohli said, adding that sophisticated algorithms trigger price reductions as soon as a consumer shows purchase intent.

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He explained that when identical SKUs are listed across channels, price becomes the sole differentiator. Acer, he noted, has adapted its go-to-market strategy by differentiating products by channel and understanding the type of customer on each platform.

Kohli also observed a resurgence in offline retail. According to him, online sales peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic but have since moderated, with consumers increasingly preferring to visit brand stores to see and feel products before purchasing. Acer currently operates around 347 exclusive stores in India.

On manufacturing, Kohli highlighted Acer India’s long-standing local presence, producing all desktops domestically while only some entry-level notebooks are made locally. High-end gaming laptops continue to be manufactured at Acer’s headquarters in Taiwan.

Kohli also critiqued India’s production-linked incentive (PLI) strategy, saying that expecting brands to bring component manufacturing to India is unrealistic given the market’s current size. He called for policy reforms to increase local value addition from the current 20% to 50–70%.

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Regarding emerging categories like AI PCs, Kohli stressed the importance of realistic pricing. He said the premium for AI-enabled PCs should be around 12–15%, noting that consumer adoption of AI PCs in India has already risen from around 3–3.5% to double digits in recent months.