This year, the organizers held two events at once under the same roof – for both corporate and consumer segments.
MERLION is an established partner of Distree Russia, the largest industry-specific forum in Russia, where vendors, distributors and their partners from among the companies geared towards the project business as well as the representatives of the retail chains have been meeting annually for 13 years.
This year, the organizers of the Distree forum, which took place from June 22 to June 23, decided to hold two events at once, for the corporate segment and for the retail trade companies specializing in home electronics.
MERLION supported the extended format of the exhibition and prepared the most large-scale booth of all that were ever used to present the leading Russian broadline distributor and its partners at Distree. This year many well-known producers of corporate IT solutions and of equipment intended for retail chains have presented their newest developments at the MERLION booth. Among the former, Allied Telesis, which announced updated network solutions, and the Fujitsu Corporation, which presented its newest server hardware equipment range and data storage systems, should be mentioned. The consumer segment aroused the interest of the largest global corporations, including, for example, Intel, which promoted at the MERLION booth its platforms for laptops, tablets, two-in-one devices as well as mini-PC NUC and micro-PC Compute Stick. The iRU brand (one of the leaders of the Russian PC market) presented popular all-in-one PCs, game PCs and nettops. Considerable interest was aroused by the new ranges of Digma smartphones as well as other products of this popular brand: tablets, digital photo frames, driving recorders and MP3 players. Also represented at the MERLION booth were the Crucial data carriers and other high-tech products and IT solutions from Russian and foreign companies.
The scale and location of the MERLION booth provided an opportunity for the distributor and its partners to take an active part both in the Distree events for producers and suppliers of corporate solutions and in events directed towards retail representatives. For both specified areas, dozens of meetings were held every day at the MERLION booth with the participation of companies working in the project business as well as the representatives of retail chains.
In the opinion of the top management of MERLION, the current format of the Distree forum is becoming important in the existing market conditions, since it permits using this platform for forming an overarching strategy of the channel development taking into account the opinions of the representatives of all the regions of Russia. Direct negotiations with the participation of the vendors, the distributor and the regional partners permit evaluating market trends correctly and using the resources of the manufacturers, their direct partners and the channels in a more direct way when promoting goods and services.
