8 | Redington India: Eventful Year

Redington entered the capital market with an IPO in Jan 07,
to raise Rs 150 crore: the issue was oversubscribed 43 times. Redingtons was
the second big IPO in the channel space in the last two years, after Tulip.

But a setback was the exit of its veteran CEO, Jitendra Kulkarni,
who had put in more than a decade at Redington; he left to start his own
business.

Redington continued to pursue its strategy to get into
higher-value businesses. For instance, its services arm, Cadenceworth, took
charge of global headsets major Plantronics new India support center in
Delhi.

The second half of the fiscal saw Redington re-structuring its
distribution business into two divisions: IT and non-IT. While the IT division
catered to its mainline IT distribution business, the non-IT division focused on
products on digital lifestyle, digital publishing, consumer durables, and
telecom. With this restructuring, the IT business is addressed through six SBUs
and non IT through three SBUs.

Redington saw good demand for its enterprise products and
solutions in large corporates and government; some of the growth drivers being
the accelerated demand for notebooks and rapid displacement of CRT monitors with
LCDs and for MFD printers. DQ