In the recent meeting in Delhi where the four regional representatives of FAIITA i.e Saket Kapoor from north, Champakbhai Gujrar from west, S Karthikeyan from south and B Hari from east met with OEMs, TDAI, and MAIT, discussed about the hot issue of OLS which is extremely sensitive and hurting the channel partners, national distributors as well as brand owners in the ICT hardware sector. In this meeting the brand owners confirmed that there were no special offers for e-commerce marketplace and to reach a constructive solution to this problem, the group present agreed upon the following actions:
To evaluate the feasibility of configuring a legal mechanism on allowing only authorized partners to sell on e-commerce platform.
Explore the building of a mechanism to tackle unauthorized sales having highly discounted prices.
Find out best practices in the market that could be adopted by this group.
Brand owners to explore – If a third party is advertising discounted rates using a brand’s IPR, what legal actions can be taken?
Brand owners to assess the option of issuing a joint advisory highlighting that the sensitivity of the issue and they are equally affected by predatory pricing as the channel community.
Brand owners to send all possible information in the questionnaires shared by channel association.
Channel association has agreed to flag all future incidents of unauthorized sales (conducted by channel partners) to the brand owners.
The group will jointly work together to apprise the government on the subject via representations and meetings.
FAIITA informed that the above-mentioned actions require 3-4 weeks, so it will be followed up with another group meeting which will also include e-commerce players. FAIITA also requested for suggestions from individual state on this so that the opinion of different states can be known. They also recommended that leaders of state associations who have planned various activities from Nov 24th 2014 for starting the purchase bandh must evaluate their local situation and take suitable action which they deem fit.
We also would like to reiterate that this is the first instance of the Nations IT associations being represented in one voice. We must remain united and not allow any divisive forces internally and externally to cause any damage to the Unity of the IT associations, says, S Karthikeyan, President SIITA.