P.S.Neogi, president IT and E.H.Kasturi Rangan ,president non-IT- Redington India

With state of the art supply chain with a slew of IT and non-IT products in its portfolio, Redington India managed to post 18% growth in FY 12. But despite impressive double digit growth, the year went by had its share of challenges as buying took a sharp hit over H2 FY12. Redington by leveraging on to its non-IT business cushioned the recessionary trends in IT and managed to sign out of the year on positive note, In an exclusive interview to DATAQUEST, P.S.Neogi, president IT and E.H.Kasturi Rangan ,president non-IT- Redington India share the key trends in distribution and the company's performance during FY 12. Excerpts.

If you look at macro trends in distribution what will be your key observations for FY 12?

While to a large extent consumer and small and medium commercial segment buying kept a reasonable - though reduced - momentum during H2 FY12, there was scarcity of demand from large enterprises and government sectors.

On market dynamics

Infrastructure related businesses took a dip during the latter part of the year. Virtualization, Storage and Security business continued to gain significant traction. While there was a lot of push into the Cloud computing space but in our view it is yet to take off in a big way.

Redington per se how would you rate the performance?

Well for us FY 12 was sharply divided into two halves with a sharp drop in traction during H2. We made a top line revenues of Rs 10,938 crore signifying 18% growth. Our revenues spread was across 6 IT SBUs - Components (14%), Enterprise (10%), Networking (11%), Peripherals (15%) and Systems (17%), Software (8%). While non- IT business contributed 25% of the total revenues.

Given the tough FY 12, what were the growth drivers?

Leading growth in the non-IT business with great momentum in Smartphone category resulted in excellent contribution by our Blackberry portfolio. The Digital Lifestyle Business outstripped expectations on the back of great momentum of Apple products and XBOX gaming devices. On IT business the revitalisation of HP's consumer notebook portfolio and the vendor's revamped GTM strategies brought in sharp dividends.

On you channel working capital initiative?

Well our NBFC is delivered through and entity called Easyaccess Financial Services. It continues to remain a differentiated value proposition from Redington to the partner community. As interest rates remained high and capital became more and more scarce, many more of our partners took advantage of the structured finance availability to cover their working capital shortfalls. Easyaccess has now moved on to become a neutral NBFC with identical offerings to partners for purchases made from Redington's competitors as well.