Redington India: Flexibility Pays

When you're among the top three distributors, you grow with the market, though topline growth may not be the top thing on your mind. Margins, creditor management, innovation in product lines, change with the market...these hold the real keys to survival. For instance, as with the industry, Redington's systems sales jumped, but in value terms stayed at the overall company average of 16%, thanks to declining hardware prices. In any case, the big chunk of systems, PCs, carry thin margins. This south-based distributor did well on the other “keys”, though. And they also helped with growth. Especially the new mobile phones business. Motorola handset sales ramped up from zero to over Rs 220 crore, a tenth of annual revenue, and with better margins than systems, at that.. Which helped make up for the slower growth in IT product revenues. Redington grew 29% overall, though DQ considers only IT revenues here and has thus removed handset revenues from the topline used for ranking. Now, what if you want even better margins? That's a no-brainer. Services. Redington been there for a while. It has BPO activities such as running a tech support call center for HP's consumer PCs, and component verification for a Singapore-based company. There are more activities in the pipeline.