Symantec is expecting the Asian region to return a revenue of about $240 million per annum by 2003. In an exclusive interview with The Financial Express, Symantec's executive vice-president (worldwide sales, marketing and services) Dana E Siebert, answered a range of questions on its gameplan for India. Excerpts:

How will the changes taking place inthe company's focus worldwide shape its India strategy?
We have a new CEO in Jon Thompson who recently took charge from IBM. He is driving the change in focus and strategy of the company. We are in the midst of moving the company's focus from being technology-oriented to customer-oriented. From three business units comprising development tools, remote productivity tools and utilities, we have now restructured into two broad business units focused on enterprise and consumers. While building on our strong anti-virus business platform, we are increasingly focusing on the content security business, adding things like URL filtering, internet access control, e-mail scanning and mobile code to our portfolio. Our business mix at present is divided 50:50 between licenced products and the packaged products. We expect the licensed business to grow much faster, particularly in India, than the packaged products in the time to come.

What is your strategy for increasing market share in India?
We areexpecting much of our sales from India coming from the licensed products rather than packaged product business. The India office will look at developing strategic alliances with internet service providers on one hand and content developers on the other. Worldwide, we aim to tie up with top three to 10 ISPs at a national level. In India also, we are talking to major three to four ISPs. We have already tied up two OEMs, HCL and Zenith, for bundling our products and are talking to more. In tune with our global strategy, we are also looking at making acquisitions of small companies in niche security areas locally to grow faster.

Are you also considering tapping the 50 per cent unorganised PC market in India in a way similar to Intel's genuine dealer scheme?
That certainly is on our mind. We are keen on exploring that opportunity, but not at this stage. A little later we will tap every possible source of increasing our revenues from India.

Why are you not keen to appoint more distributors in Indiaor set up a subsidiary?
A subsidiary is not on our agenda immediately, but anything is possible in a year or two. But our next immediate step will be to set up offices in all major metros. Pacific is our sole distributor as there is little sense in making the margins tight by appointing many distributors. Right now, we are pretty satisfied with what they are doing. But we will evaluate that after six months and do a raincheck on how we have fared. Strengthening the reseller cannel is high on our agenda. Meanwhile, we are setting up a direct sales team to identify opportunities in the market.

Your biggest competitor Network Associates is also very bullish on the Indian market. It is very aggressive in the US on price points? What will be your strategy on that front?
Fighting with freebies has never been our strategy and we will not do it here. Even if we lose out on some market share initially, we know we can regain it because we are a long-term player. We are no doubt going to becompetitive, but not necessarily be the lowest on price points. The idea of setting India office is to build on service and technical support for our products while creating more awareness about our products with the customers. That we feel will be a bigger differentiator in the market, much like elsewhere. In Mumbai, we have set up a call centre. When the volumes justify it, we will look at setting up more call centres.