The Asus headquarters in Taipei looks like a fortress among a skyline of factories, logistics hubs, and the quiet hum of one of the world's most formidable PC supply chains. But inside a conference room, the conversation kept returning to a market far away, i.e., India. With its 1.4 billion people, sub-15 per cent PC penetration, and a consumer base that has surprised even the most optimistic forecasters, India has become the country Asus watches most carefully, and invests in most deliberately.
Leading the session were two architects of that strategy, Peter Chang, General Manager for Asia Pacific at ASUS's System Business Group, and Arnold Su, Vice President of ASUS India, both veterans in the business, navigating the country's sprawling, contradictory, and enormous PC market. Together, they laid out a picture of a brand that is growing rapidly, managing structural headwinds, and positioning itself for what could be its most consequential era yet.
India: More Than Just A Market
The framing Peter Chang uses for India is deliberate. "We treat India as a home country," he said, "meaning we invest deeply in localisation and understanding local needs." The numbers back it up. India is now Asus's largest market in the Asia Pacific region (APAC) and the third largest worldwide. Given where the country stands in its PC adoption curve, both Chang and Su believe that ranking is only going one direction.
Arnold Su took that framing further with a story that has quietly become a cornerstone of ASUS India's confidence. In 2018 to 19, when Asus launched the ZenBook Pro Duo with its dual-screen design, it was an expensive, unusual product with no guarantee of traction in a market notorious for price sensitivity. ASUS took the bet anyway. India became the second-largest market for that product globally, ahead of the United States and China. "That taught us something important," Su said. "If the product is unique and the benefit is clear, Indian consumers will pay”, he added.
"If the product is unique and the benefit is clear, Indian consumers will pay." - Arnold Su, Vice President, ASUS India
The lesson was reinforced by the ROG Zephyrus G14. When ASUS offered the AniMatrix display, a customisable LED matrix panel on the laptop's lid, at a 10,000-rupee premium, the expectation internally was modest uptake. Instead, 40 per cent of customers chose to pay extra for it in the first year. That single data point reshaped how Asus approaches India's premium segment. It was not with scepticism anymore, but with cautious ambition.
RAMageddon And How ASUS Is Managing It
The roundtable took place against an uncomfortable backdrop. Laptop prices across the industry have risen sharply, approximately 20 to 30 per cent over the past five months for the same products, according to Su, driven by tariff pressures, supply chain reconfiguration, and the growing cost of AI-capable components. Chang was unambiguous about the outlook: prices are unlikely to come down for at least one to two years.
The industry's default response to such pressures, pass costs to consumers and hope for the best, is not the ASUS position. Chang described a deliberate rethink of how products are configured. "In the past, competition drove everyone to keep adding digital specs," he said. "16GB of RAM became 32GB simply because competitors were doing it. Now we are stepping back and asking what users actually need." For everyday use cases like web browsing, documents, and casual media, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage may be perfectly sufficient — and pricing those machines accordingly is a meaningful way to keep the category accessible.
This rethink will materialise in the second half of 2025 with new ZenBook and VivoBook S configurations that Chang described as "optimised rather than over-specced." On the software side, ASUS has also been working with Microsoft to reduce the resource footprint of Windows on lower-end hardware, not through patches, but through what Chang hinted is a new OS configuration specifically for 8GB-class devices, with heavier background processes stripped out.
The details remain under embargo for now, but the direction is clear: ASUS wants the entry-level experience to be genuinely good, not just technically functional.
"The remaining 85 per cent of Indian households that do not yet own a PC represent a massive opportunity." - Arnold Su
EMI As Infrastructure: Making High Prices Palatable
Perhaps the most practically revealing data point of the session came from Arnold Su's discussion of EMI trends. Before the recent price increases, around 20 per cent of ASUS product sales in India were financed through equated monthly instalments. That figure rose to approximately 30 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 and has since climbed to between 35 and 40 per cent.
The insight driving ASUS's EMI strategy is behavioural rather than financial. "If we can keep the monthly instalment below 4,000 rupees," Su said, "customers become comfortable, even if the total product value has increased significantly."
The implication is that Indian consumers are not rejecting expensive laptops; they are restructuring how they think about the purchase. The shift from a nine-month maximum EMI tenure to 12 to 24 months as the new industry norm has effectively doubled the period over which a customer can spread the cost. ASUS has formalised this through partnerships with financing players, including Bajaj Finance and Pioneer, offering zero per cent EMI arrangements for up to four months.
The result, in market share terms, has been striking. While the overall market grew approximately 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, ASUS India grew 30 per cent in units. Market share stood at 21.7 per cent in the first quarter, climbed to 22 per cent in April, and reached 24.7 per cent in May. Su confirmed that ASUS's aspiration to become the number one consumer PC brand in India, an ambition he set out in 2024, remains on track for 2025.
624 Districts And Counting: The Distribution Story
One of the most striking aspects of ASUS India's strategy is the sheer scale of its distribution ambition. India has 780 districts and more than 6,000 talukas. ASUS is currently present in 624 districts and approximately 2,000 talukas, coverage that most technology brands would consider implausible, let alone executable.
The logic, Su explained, is not altruistic. It is commercial. "We took inspiration from Wahaha," he said, referring to the Chinese bottled water brand that built its dominance not through advertising but through ubiquitous distribution in remote regions. "When you are the only brand available in a small town, customers buy you." The parallel to HP's long-standing distribution advantage in India, which Su explicitly named as the benchmark ASUS has been chasing, underscores how seriously the company takes last-mile presence as a competitive moat.
The counterintuitive finding from this expansion is that opening stores in smaller district towns does not cannibalise sales in nearby metros. Instead, it captures demand that was already travelling from smaller towns to city stores - and keeps it local. The 324 exclusive stores and 25 dedicated gaming stores across India are a physical expression of this strategy. Gaming stores, Su noted, go further: they include gaming zones where customers can spend one to two hours testing devices before purchasing - "similar to a car test drive," as he put it.
"When you are the only brand available in a small town, customers buy you." - Arnold Su
Service: The Elephant In The Room
If distribution is ASUS India's quiet strength, after-sales service has historically been its vulnerability. The question was raised directly. ASUS's service reputation is seen by many customers and observers as lagging behind HP and Lenovo. Su's response was notably candid.
ASUS's committed turnaround time is three working days in metros, five days in non-metro cities, and seven days for locations more than 150 kilometres from a service centre. The company targets a 99.5 per cent adherence rate and is currently tracking between 99 and 99.5 per cent. But with approximately one million units sold annually in India, even a 0.5 per cent shortfall represents a meaningful number of cases. A specific pain point, devices returning for the same fault multiple times, carries a repeat rate of approximately 0.1 per cent of total service volume. ASUS has addressed this by accelerating replacements for repeat cases, including swapping out entire motherboards rather than individual components when a fault recurs.
The expansion of service infrastructure has been significant: approximately 20 new service centres opened in the past year alone, compared to the one or two openings that were typical in prior years. Drop zones, convenient collection and return points at exclusive stores, now number approximately 30 locations across the country. A component replacement programme introduced in January 2026 allows ASUS to ship replacement peripherals like keyboards and adapters directly to customers' homes and collect the defective units, a model Su said was inspired by Lego's spare-parts service.
Chang put the aspiration plainly: "One day, like HP or Dell, nobody will talk about ASUS service issues because it will just work. We are not there yet, but that is the standard we are targeting."
The AI PC Narrative: From Feature To Architecture
For all the India-specific texture of the conversation, the technological undercurrent running through the entire session was artificial intelligence. Chang opened with a declaration: AI agents in the PC, not just AI features, represent the next major shift. ASUS Chairman Johnny Shih had made the same point publicly earlier that week, and the company's Computex announcements were built around this thesis.
The practical challenge is that agentic AI workloads demand significantly more from hardware than the NPU-based AI capabilities that have defined the first wave of AI PCs. Chang was clear about which platforms ASUS sees as suited to which workloads: AMD's high-end chiplet designs, specifically the Strix Halo, are positioned for local AI and agentic AI tasks. Qualcomm's strength is battery life and its integration with Google's ecosystem, making it the platform for thinner, lighter, everyday AI devices. Intel anchors the mainstream on the strength of software compatibility and broad daily utility. Nvidia-powered machines serve creative and high-performance AI use cases.
To simplify this for consumers, ASUS has developed what it calls ASUS OLED AI Cloud, a system that detects whether a device has sufficient local AI processing capability and, where it does not, routes tasks to cloud-based computation. The goal is a seamless AI experience regardless of hardware tier.
One of the most important announcements this year at Computex is, hands down, the introduction of the Nvidia RTX Spark SoC, and Asus was among the OEM partners mentioned in Jensen Huang's keynote. The chip that can probably be the most game-changing innovation of the modern PC era will come in Asus laptops too, and as per the conversation with the Asus India/APAC leadership, these laptops “will come to India soon”.
What 30 Per Cent Penetration Could Mean For India
The roundtable closed with a question that reframes India's PC story entirely. India's current PC penetration rate is estimated at 10 to 15 per cent of households. If that figure reaches 30 to 40 per cent, the kind of penetration common in more mature technology markets, where would India rank for Asus globally?
Chang's answer was unambiguous: given India's population scale, the country would likely become Asus's single largest market in the world, surpassing every other geography. Su provided the counterpoint that grounds the ambition in the present: "The remaining 85 per cent of Indian households that do not yet own a PC represent a massive opportunity. Even with all the current pricing and supply chain pressures, that long-term growth potential is what keeps us deeply committed to investing here."
The picture that emerges from a morning in Taipei is of a company that has stopped treating India as a market to be served and started treating it as a market to be built. The infrastructure investments, in distribution, service, localisation, EMI partnerships, and dedicated retail, reflect a decade-long accumulation of conviction. And if the penetration numbers move in the direction both Chang and Su expect, the bet will have been among the most consequential in the PC industry's recent history.
Keep following BWTV Prime and BW Businessworld for more tech updates. |
