Altech takes it up a gear

Over 200 resellers and vendors showed up for the opening of distributor Altech's new offices in Springvale, Melbourne, as the city revved up for the Formula One Grand Prix.

The third branch on the eastern seaboard after Brisbane and the Sydney headquarters, the new warehouse will meet demand from the southern states. 'We needed to get closer to resellers' in Victoria, said Altech's GM of sales and marketing Safa Joumaa.

The Melbourne offices will also better service clients in South Australia and Tasmania by reducing freight costs, said Joumaa, adding that the company was keen to increase face to face contact and foster loyalty with its local reseller base in Victoria.

The new premises is currently operating with a staff of 10, to be increased to 30 by the end of the year. Joumaa said Altech is looking at 55 percent growth based on the size of the Melbourne market.

Joumaa described the Springvale operation as a duplicate of the Sydney and Brisbane branches, with an identical line-up of vendors wooing a similar stable of resellers.

The presence of several video card manufacturers and ABIT, the most easily overclocked motherboard in the market, suggests that Altech are interested in the lucrative high-end gaming market.

This is clear in the recent addition of Geeks Direct in Auckland, New Zealand as a subsidiary. Geeks Direct's new business director Grant Ovenden, who had flown over for the opening, said computer gaming LAN parties had doubled every two years and were a fairly good indicator of the market's size.
'The gaming market [in New Zealand] has just exploded,' said Ovenden. Geeks Direct is building a warehouse the same size as Altech's Melbourne offices in anticipation of demand.

Joumaa said that a move to the West coast later this year was also possible, depending on the success of Melbourne and New Zealand.

ABIT also flew down two representatives from its Taiwan headquarters for the evening to bolster its 'nearly exclusive' relationship with Altech. The manufacturer hopes to boost its figures of 6,000 motherboards a month to over 10,000 with the addition of the Melbourne branch.

To mark the occasion ABIT announced that it would provide a buffer stock of motherboards in all Altech offices to cut down waiting time for replacements. Rather than waiting four weeks for testing and replacement of faulty boards at the factory in Taiwan, resellers can pick up new stock from Altech on the same day.

There was some controversy in the night with one business card appearing twice in the lucky dip. Another reseller also did suspiciously well in the sweepstakes, with three employees picking up prizes from the Formula One-themed 'Altech girls'.