Repairs with imported equipment in Russia – Newspaper Kommersant No. 224 (7425) dated 12/02/2022

Leading electronics distributors are expanding their capacity to repair foreign equipment, primarily to serve corporate clients. So, OCS has increased its service area this year, Marvel Distribution, which launched a service center last year, is also planning to expand. Companies expect to take a significant share of the after-sales service market in the corporate segment against the backdrop of the departure of foreign vendors who have stopped supporting their products. Players call this segment more profitable and attractive than the service for retail clients.

One of the largest electronics distributors OCS (Asus, Huawei, Samsung, Nvidia, etc.) plans to expand the service for repairing equipment for the corporate segment, including retailers, the company told Kommersant. The distributor will repair the equipment of brands that were in its portfolio before the outbreak of hostilities. To do this, OCS modernized its modular workshop, which was previously used for warehouse space, “the area has increased tenfold, from tens of square meters to hundreds.”

OCS did not specify the amount of investment in the project, but noted that they annually invest “tens of millions of rubles” in the development of service centers. “Expenses are mainly spent on the purchase of equipment, the construction of repair facilities and the training of employees,” they explained.

As spare parts for equipment of foreign brands that have stopped official deliveries, OCS plans to use decommissioned equipment – “during transportation, a pool of illiquid equipment is always formed.”

After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine and the suspension of official deliveries of most brands, many Russian service centers began to dismantle used and new equipment for spare parts due to a lack of components, and the time and cost of repairs increased significantly (see “Kommersant” dated June 29).

Now the volume of the market for providing service contracts for the corporate sector is from several hundred million to a billion rubles a year, and within two years it will grow several times, a Kommersant source in the electronics market believes.

According to him, after foreign companies stopped providing service support services, many specialists appeared on the market, who were actively hired by Russian distributors.

Distributors began to have their own service divisions for the corporate sector in the fall of 2021, says Andrey Eremin, director of the technical services department at Marvel Distribution. “This happened due to the fact that vendors either stopped coping with the volume of repairs, or could not meet the requirements that large customers made to the service,” he says.

F+ tech holding (includes distributor Marvel) opened its own service center at the end of 2021 and plans to expand it. Now a guarantee is provided for all imported corporate equipment, but partners are involved in the repair and replacement of consumer equipment, since this is a low-margin segment, says Mr. Eremin. In the short term, in his opinion, the service market will be redistributed towards distributors or independent service companies.

Retailers solve the issue of service in different ways. M.Video-Eldorado said that they are cooperating with authorized service centers of manufacturers, distributor networks and independent companies. “We are also open to cooperation with new partners,” the company says. At MegaFon, at the same time, they said that they themselves carry out diagnostics and repair of equipment. “Now we have no need for additional development of this direction,” they note there.

Timofey Kornev