One For The Team

Tech industry veteran and Acer India head, Harish Kohli talks about sustaining the growth of the Taiwanese hardware and software giant with Gen Next

- Priyanca Vaishnav

Of his 36-year-long career, Harish Kohli has spent close to half of it at Acer India (since 1999). Of these years, Kohli took on the mantle of President and MD six years ago at the fag end of 2011. With his proven track record in driving sustainable growth for organisations even before Acer India, Kohli has rich experience in building and scaling businesses even in his previous stints at giants.

Kohli has been instrumental in charting Acer India’s business growth with a strong foundation in both commercial as well as consumer businesses over the last 19 years. Having led Acer India to the No. 2 position in the consumer business and overall among the top 3 PC brands in the country, Kohli entered Acer through its erstwhile Enterprise Product division as the marketing and sales chief, and successfully built Acer India’s portfolio in all market segments.

THE ACER JOURNEY

Acer India -- a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent Acer Computer International -- was incorporated in 1999, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka. Kohli was among the first 56 people to be on-boarded at the time in the now-defunct Enterprise Product division, to look after sales and marketing. “When I joined Acer India, it was a startup in India because we were out of the joint venture (Wipro Infotech entered into a joint venture agreement with the then $3 billion Acer International to form a new company, Wipro-Acer, in which Wipro had a 55 per cent stake and manufactured and market computer peripherals and other related products for Acer in the country), which meant we had to build the organisation from scratch and sell the first US dollar of the billing as well. In my own way, I feel Acer has been a company that believes in the entrepreneurial way of working. That pleases me and that’s why I came to work here. The amount of freedom the parent company gives is tremendous.”