Taiwan-based chipset developer VIA Technologies plans to open a South African office by the end of the year as a base for the continent.
This news follows AMD's announcement last week that its local office would open on 1 July.
Werner Du Plessis, VIA's business development manager, has regularly travelled to SA to develop relationships with vendors, partners and government. However, Richard Brown, the company's VP of marketing, says it is important to have fulltime local representation.
"As an industry, we are taking emerging markets far more seriously - all the action around innovation is in emerging markets. We are aiming to have an office in SA before the end of the year. This office will also service our customers throughout the continent," explains Brown.
Facing challenges
Brown admits the company, not nearly as well known as competitors Intel and AMD, has several challenges to overcome, particularly in awareness-building.
"We are still trying to find the right strategies and business models for the African market. At the moment, we are taking a fairly conservative approach, leveraging the work we have done with governments and our partnership with the Department of Education. However, we've seen some good results from our work in India and will use this experience in the local office," he says.
Brown says SA-born Du Plessis, who represented VIA in India, is the best person to deploy to the continent. Du Plessis will be tasked with building the local partner eco-system.
As for moves to build awareness of the company and its technology offerings, Brown says global marketing is high on VIA's agenda.
"We have a huge job to do, getting that awareness out there. But we don't have the budgets of our competitors, so we have to take a smarter approach," he explains.
Pricing pressure
As part of its strategy, VIA builds relationships with vendors by developing reference designs for end products.
"The whole of Taiwan's [IT manufacturing industry] is facing pricing pressure. Today, it's all a volume game. Our biggest challenge is finding value creation for our partners.
"We have started developing reference designs as we realise that we can't wait for our customers to design products incorporating our technologies because they may not necessarily have those design resources."
He concludes: "If we want our customers to use our platform, we have to show them the design. Unlike three to five years ago, our business now is in design - we've got to be more daring and more creative to meet our customers' requirements."
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