Thinking about Kingston as a company, we mainly think of it as a retail brand and in the memory card market, USB, etc, but today Kingston has evolved with much broader and bigger domains with many capabilities.
Kingston along with Arrow hosted their first ever memory convention in Delhi on 3rd June 2019 and in Bangalore on 7th June 2019 to talk about the market trends in the memory and embedded industry and share the success stories and provide a platform for discussion with memory experts.
Darwin Chen, Chairman, Kingston Solutions kickstarted the event and welcomed the gathering with his opening keynote at the Delhi convention. The other leaders at the Bangalore and Delhi convention were Andy Chou, Vice President, Kingston Solutions, Anand Jayapalan, Vice president, Kingston Digital, Todd Tu, Project Manager, Kingston Solutions, Arun Kumar, Indian Sales Director, Kingston Solutions and other representatives from Taiwan. Arun drives the business development and sales operation across India, and he leads the Kingston Solutions team in India.
Kingston Technology Corporation wears multiple hats and caters various markets under titles, Kingston Technology focusing on DRAM Solutions, Kingston Digital on NAND Solutions, HyperX dedicated for gaming solutions, Advanced Validation labs for testing services, Kingston Technology Services works for OEM, ODM and EMS logistics and Kingston Solutions Inc (KSI) develops Embedded solutions.
Stepping on to the Embedded Side
Kingston is starting its journey towards the embedded industry today in a slow but steady pace by understanding the market requirements and gearing up to drive it.
During the convention, the spokespersons from Kingston also emphasised on their strong manufacturing presence across all markets and in business like supply and logistics and OEMs. With embedded business units headquartered in Taiwan, Kingston plans to expand and grow in the Indian embedded system market with a strong but steady target. This memory convention was a chance for companies and partners in the Embedded Space to interact with senior representatives from Taiwan and global heads of Kingston.
“As we get into the market, we want to understand it better. We know what is driving the market requirements, but whether it is a certain product side or capacities or the use cases, can be understood only when we talk to customers and partners. The philosophy and the plan here are to learn and then and implement bigger and brighter things in line with what the India government is looking for”, says Anand Jayapalan, Vice president, Product and Segment Strategy- Flash Storage Business Unit, Kingston Digital.
The core competence of KSI in the tech side includes the JEDEC Compliance, Latest Technology Node, In-house Controller, FW Customization and Advanced Validation Lab. The products are assured to meet REACH and ISO compliance, RMA Policy, will be provided on-site technical support.
“We are a private company, so we want to do things right. We want to grow in a very organized and systematic way. We have signed with the partner and we have a very good distributor Arrow and we are ready with a pipeline”, adds Anand Jayapalan.
The Indian Market
With the Make in India Initiatives and with a lot of start-ups and Independent Design houses set up in the country, Kingston feels this would be the right time help and participate in the growth.
“We reasonably well penetrated in the global market. For example, we have a good presence in China with a lot of IDHs and OEMs. Make in India initiatives adds on an additional advantage of building the products in India. This along with our existing relationships in the market gives us a head start into the market”, says Anand Jayapalan.
“We see the Indian Market very accepting and adapting as well. We have signed a partnership with Arrow, and we have announced a strategic collaboration with a few OEMs.
We have kickstarted into the market and we are seeing it very good response too”, says Arun Kumar, Sales Director India. While the main R&D team for KSI will be at Taiwan handling production, sales, FAE and finance, KSI will sales teams in China, Korea, Europe and India and support team in China.
Mobile Market is another focus
In line with the embedded solutions market, in addition to the automotive market, the main aim of Kingston is to target the mobile industry. With our Indian population and easy adaption towards mobile trends, it’s a promising market with substantial growth.
“If you look at the two largest markets, the US and China, the YoY (year over year) that we are seeing in these two markets are less than 5 per cent. This means that the overall global demand for cell phone is not that good. But luckily India came to a rescue in this picture, with 1 billion population and the evolving usage of smartphones. This gives us a really big potential to come here”, Todd Tu, Project Manager, Kingston Solutions.
With more than 30 attendees and multiple talks from representatives from Kingston and Arrow, the convention brought in some very new ideas to the table and knowledge in terms of trends in the current market.
Pipeline Set
In the year 2016, Kingston Solutions introduced ePoP targeting wearable applications and in the year 2017, they reached a record high in volume shipment – over 100M pieces. With this same goal and roadmap Kingston is all set for the Indian Industry.
“Even our competitors Samsung or Sandisk are our partners. We have long term agreements with most of them, like Toshiba. We work with partners, identify the right controls, and then we design the product, we defined the product, what specifications we need, and then we assemble the product and test the product.”, says Arun Kumar, Indian Sales Director, Kingston Solutions.
The main objectives of the team are to embrace with “Make in India” Policy, leverage market experiences from China, engage with local partners directly and provide value through service and flexibility.
With all this in place, let us hope to see a new revolution in the embedded industry with Kingston’s solutions.
