Sharjah: E4U, a UAE-based electronics store, is opening the country’s first “download station” where customers can legally download music and entertainment content onto any electronic device as a differentiation point from competition, a top executive said.

Following the opening of the seventh retail outlet in Sharjah yesterday, plans are under way to expand into Qatar and Oman by 2012 and other GCC countries over the next five years with bigger stores.

“There is major competition here and some stores are closing down,” Abdul Jabbar Al Sayegh, Chairman and CEO of Al Sayegh Brothers which owns E4U, told Gulf News. “If [the new store] breaks even in the next few months, we’ll be more than happy. Our target was to break even in one year.”

Deputy Chief Executive Officer Iqbal Hussain said expansion in an already oversaturated electronics market was “looking a step ahead”.

“We are not looking at the current capacity of the market. We are investing for future capacity. Over the past few years the market has shown good growth, 10 to 20 per cent year on year,” Iqbal said. “Some stores will go out of business because of incompetence, short-term strategies, and no backing of a big organisation.”

The outlets’ survival depended partly on their affiliation with the Al Sayegh Brothers group which has diversified into oil and electro-mechanical projects, said Iqbal.

In an oversaturated market where the electronic products and prices are similar, the four-year old retail store is scrambling to find a unique selling point.

The download station, a programme to exchange old mobile phones for new products, appealing to tech-savvy youngsters, and well informed staff are the store’s unique features according to E4U Retail Operations Manager Vikas Jewoor.

E4U partnered with Getmo.com, the online entertainment provider, to launch the download station on July 4.

But why go to the store for downloads when you can do it from the comfort of your own home via a laptop, computer, or mobile phone?

“This is one point which we highlight: whichever downloads [people do] are not legal, it’s pirated. This is our corporate social responsibility: Don’t go with pirated music; let’s go legal. That’s why we are highlighting legal music and gaming,” said Jewoor.

Customers get a Getmo scratch card to download content from the website for free when they make certain product purchases, he added.

“It is a fight in the marketplace, you have to compete and marketing is the major thing to make the store competitive,” he said of his expectations for the new store’s revenue.