MERLION is planning to become No.1 in Kazakhstan.

The official subject of meeting with partners was opening a new MERLION office in Almaty. The biggest Russian IT-distributor is planning a serious expansion into the country’s market and is making large investments in the development of its representative office.

Besides moving to a new office in Almaty (in May 2012), MERLION has dramatically increased its warehouse capabilities. A new warehouse of the distributor has been opened just in the city center and has become one of the largest distributor warehouses on the IT-market of Kazakhstan with the area exceeding 1400 m2). New logistics capabilities enabled MERLION to increase significantly its commodity range and partner services, and for a number of items switch to direct deliveries from vendors to the warehouse in Kazakhstan. Nowadays the MERLION Company delivers to Almaty equipment and software of 55 vendors, and it is rapidly increasing the number of distributor contracts.

More than 70 partners, not only from Almaty, but also from many big cities around the country, attended the conference. The opening of the event was performed by Victoria Tarantina, director for business development in the CIS countries of the MERLION Company. Victoria told about distributor’s plans for the next years and presented the partner policy of the company.

“We are aiming for extremely ambitious plans, - told Victoria Tarantina. – According to the results of the year 2012 we expect to achieve a share of 5% of the country's IT-market, and we make it our mission by 2015 to become No.1 in Kazakhstan and have a market share of about 15%. And for this reason MERLION is making large investments in its development. Significant amounts of money are invested in the infrastructure and growth of representative office. In addition to the new warehouse and office, our staff has increased twice during this year. But the main object of our investments is sure to be our partners. We offer to our partners in Kazakhstan extended financial services, a full package of engineering and technical support, provided by both Moscow and Kazakhstan engineers. We are planning to provide our partners significant marketing support and additional services, such as personnel training, certification and demonstration equipment. All this enables us to plan establishing by 2015 the widest partner network, which will cover all important players of the IT-market of Kazakhstan and Central Asia region.”

At the conference there also participated and spoke vendors, which aim at developing the IT-market of this region together with MERLION: NETGEAR, Acer, APC by Schneider Electric, Intel, Seagate, Siemens Enterprise Communications.

The MERLION Company entered Kazakhstan market with a whole number of new brands, which can enlarge partners’ product range and open new and profitable market segments for them. All participants of the conference appreciated it as a very efficient and useful event for the development of joint business in Kazakhstan.