REDINGTON INDIA: A Decade in Distribution

CEO Jitendra Kulkarni Startup-Year 1993 Products & Services Distributor of peripherals, PCs, components, networking products and services Branches 28 Dealer outlets 6,200 Address SPL Guindy House, 95, Mount Road, Guindy, Chennai 600032 Tel 22353313-16 Fax 22300940 Website www.redingtonindia.com

Jitendra Kulkarni CEO M Raghunandan Director (service) R Govindan V-P (business development) Aniruddha Joshi V-P (business development) Clynton Almeida General manager (IT)

Showed 19% growth in a tough year, bouncing back from a weak 0.4% growth in 2001-02 Broad-based product portfolio. Exclusive tieup with HP for consumer desktops tech support Tieup with Singapore’s PCS for verification of components

A good distribution model that helps in managing multiple brands Very experienced management team Benefits of CRM and ERP implementation over the last two years are just beginning to trickle in

Unable to penetrate eastern region in a big way Needs better branding

Fiscal 2002-03 was quite a year for this Chennai-based IT distribution major.
It dominated the headlines in the last quarter with a proposed merger with
Mumbai-based networking and systems integration company Global Tele-Systems. The
stated rationale–Redington’s supply chain management expertise would help the new
entity better manage multiple brands. The merger, however, found few believers
and even as skeptics has a field day, it was called off. That one discordant
note apart, the company had a bright year–and healthy 19% growth, compared to
a flat last year.

A bulk of the revenues came from peripherals and systems sales, which
accounted for 35% and 24%, respectively. Most business lines grew, including
component sales (up 25% to Rs 424 crore) and packaged software (up 28% to Rs 203
crore). The only weak quarter for the distributor was Q1–when revenues
declined as a result of the uncertainties following the HP-Compaq merger.
Redington also showed a good spread of revenues geographically, but penetration
in the eastern region remained low. It got about 47% per cent of its business
from the south, while the north and the west were balanced–21% and 25% of
revenues, respectively.

The company broad-based its product portfolio, inducting Avaya’s networking
products and Mercury motherboards. On the enterprise side, it added IBM’s
RS6000 UNIX servers. On the services front, Redington strengthened its network
and launched nine spare stocking points across India.

Interestingly, Redington now has an exclusive tieup with HP for managing the
latter’s technical support call center for consumer desktops. Another
significant tieup was with Singapore-based PCS for verification of components
for companies like Western Digital and Iomega.

And, Redington’s decision to go in for an
ERP implementation in 2000 and CRM initiatives in 2001 are finally beginning to
pay off.