‘India will soon be an export hub for neighboring countries’

Emerson Network Power India (ENPI) completed 10 years of operations in India this year. It has succeeded in establishing a significant presence with uptime solutions across a wide spectrum of industry verticals in this time. Earlier known as Tata Liebert, the company was re-branded as ENPI in 2001, moving out of the joint venture with the Tata Group. Rinki Banerji spoke with

Gene Hayden, vice-president, ENP Asia Pacific, about the key initiatives for growth, the current state of the market, and emerging opportunities.Excerpts:

l What has been the impact of the transition–from being a Tata brand to Emerson?



We could have used the Liebert brand after exiting our collaboration with the Tatas. Instead, we chose to have the ‘Emerson Network Power India’ brand empowered across the country. People conveniently refer to and recognize our products with the brand name ‘Emerson’, and we have not suffered in sales. We believe we have established a clear awareness everywhere.

Gene Hayden

vice-president, ENP Asia Pacific

l What are the key new initiatives that promise growth?



We are now developing next-generation UPSs with double conversion technology to be marketed across India. We will continue to market our ‘network uptime solutions’ across segments. We expect to see India as the export hub for neighboring countries like Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in the near future, and this business will cumulatively account for a substantial part of the Indian subcontinent’s total exports. Apart from these activities, we will soon be launching our global software development center (SDC) in India. And, very importantly, we are all set to forge key engineering alliances with China for developing global product platforms and indigenous products for the South East Asian

market.

l You have SDCs in Italy, China and the US. On what activity will the Indian SDC focus?



Our SDCs develop software solutions for our uptime products. We have already established a monitoring system in China that allows end-users to log onto the Internet and access log files about every activity undertaken by our network of products.

The biggest advantage here is that our monitoring system can send alerts to a pager or mobile or any communication device about an abnormal function happening at the user’s end. None of our competitors–APC or Powerware and the rest–have such a system in place as of now. Our plan to have a global SDC here is purely for launching our monitoring system in India, thereby reducing convenience-related problems for our customers.

l Which market segments do you find lucrative for uptime solutions in India?



We already have a significant presence across data centers, the telecom industry, medical electronics and software factories.

As of now, we find that the IT services industry is a lucrative area where uptime is highly critical. We basically develop products and solutions to cater to the needs of enterprises.

l Ten years in the country … where do see the company in the years to come? 



We have been growing at a rate of 30% y-o-y since our inception. We have even had surprising growth rates, sometimes as much as 65%. As of now, we are getting 25% revenues through sales in the IT sector and 22% of revenues from sales in the telecom sector. Another reason for our inevitable future growth is going to be the awareness of the need for uptime in India.

One of our latest studies, which was conducted along with MAIT, has shockingly revealed that India Inc. loses as much as Rs 20,000 crore per annum as a result of downtime due to poor power quality. That’s a huge opportunity.

RINKI BANERJI in Mumbai