The Hardware Kings

Though Xenitis has captured the national imagination with its sub-10K PCs, it

would be grossly unfair to believe that manufacturing in Kolkata starts and ends

with Aamar PC. In fact, there has been a significant resurgence in the hardware

market in Kolkata in recent years. Many of the vendors are doing thriving

business-major among them are in the domain of UPSes.

Supertron Electronics



Other than Xenitis, the biggest news on the PC front to emerge from Kolkata

in recent times is Supertron acquiring the exclusive rights for marketing and

manufacturing Vintron PCs in the country. Supertron had taken over the

once-popular Vintron brand and brought into its fold Vintron's PC

manufacturing line, significant marketing personnel as well as the ownership of

the Vintron brand. Till now, the company has been keen on positioning its own

brand of Supercomp PCs more in the eastern market while the northern market has

been targeted with the Vintron brand. Result: it recently bagged an order worth

Rs 1.8 crore for its Vintron brand of PCs from various engineering and IT

colleges in Uttranchal and Uttar Pradesh.

Reveals VK Bhandari, Director, Supertron Electronics, "Strategically our

focus this year is to concentrate more on the bottomline; the Vintron PCs are

definitely helping us to achieve this, but more impactful would be the 32

Supercomp brand USB and the accessory products we are launching like data

cables, external TV tuner cards, pen drives etc." What helped the company

close the year at Rs 139 crore were the two product segments of hard disk drives

and motherboards. Seagate and Mercury were the two big brands that brought in

the major chunk of its business.

Having received the best distributor award from Skoch Summit, some of the

leading companies it represents are Pinacle's Dazzle, Acer, Canon, Intel,

Kobian, LG, Microsoft and Seagate. Supertron made its presence felt in the

retail market by opening its first retail outlet in Kolkata and adding two more

this year. These showrooms are multi-branded and products on display are from

vendors like HCL, Acer, HP besides its own brands. It also doubles up as an LG

MyShopee outlet. With the Vintron acquisition, Supertron seems on its way to

become a national level player.

Admits Bhandari, "As a company, Vintron was nearly going defunct.

However, they continued to enjoy a strong brand-pull among end-customers for

their PC range. This is why we decided to take over their PC business, to

establish Supertron as a truly national PC player." Supertron is now also

gearing to launch self-branded notebooks. But Bhandari assures that this will

not create a clash of interest with its distribution of Acer notebooks. "We

are more or less a stockist for Acer and are not involved in brand building

exercises. So if there is demand for Acer's notebooks, we will supply

it," he clarifies.

Syntech Group of Companies



The fastest growing company in the DQCI Silver Club of Solution Providers,

Syntech Informatics and Milon Chakraborty, MD, registered a whopping 61% growth

in 2004-05 to end the year with Rs 61 crore. It has been showing spectacular

growth over the last few years-from a turnover of Rs 1 crore in 2000-01, it

reached Rs 4 crore in 2001-02, Rs 8 crore in 2002-03 and then Rs 36 crore in

2003-04. Till now, this continuous growth curve could be attributed to its role

as a premier system integrator in the East, though with the company launching

its own iSyn brand of PCs there are hopes of even more spectacular growth in the

coming year as the company plans to touch Rs 100 crore.

Till now, the overall Syntech Group had four operating companies-Syntech

Informatics handling the PC business; Syntech Infoprojects handling the SI

projects; Syntech Service & Support functioning as the ASP of IBM and HP;

while Syntech Infotech primarily handling sales and services function. MD Milon

Chakraborty informs that now all four companies would function under Syntech

Technologies India Ltd and under this name the company might go for an IPO next

year

On March 11 this year, the company launched its own iSyn brand of PCs and

laptops-currently the production capacity is 700 per month, though this number

is likely to shoot up once the company goes national. It has also launched its

own iSyn brand of UPS-and by Q3 the company is set to launch other consumer

electronics products like plasma TV, DVD players, MP3 players and USB flash

drives. Even PC production capacity is expected to reach up to 1500/3000

per month. Though this sounds like an ambitious undertaking, Chakraborty is

confident of making it work. He is getting into consumer electronics (CE) as

these are fast selling products, which he can offer to his existing clientele

alongside an IT solution package. Syntech has even opened an office in Shanghai,

to be closer to its OEM partners.

On the SI front, last year, the company implemented several lucrative

projects. One of them was a West Bengal school deployment under the School

Literacy Mission where 200 schools were computerized with 10,000 PCs across

various districts of West Bengal. The project was valued at Rs 8 crore. Syntech

also computerized 493 police stations across the state for a project costing Rs

4.5 crore.

HiTA Technologies



HiTA Technologies ranks amongst the Top Five UPS brands in the country. Arun
Ghosh, MD, HiTA Technology revealed the reason behind this Taiwanese company

setting up shop in Kolkata: "Obviously it is because of the proximity of

the Kolkata port to Taiwan that prompted HiTA to set up their India base in this

city."

With a turnover of Rs 15 crore, HiTA is emerging as a serious competition to

other leading UPS vendors in the country. While APC is gradually shifting focus

towards datacenters and Emerson registering dwindling revenues, 2005-06 could

well be the year for HiTA. With its range of products starting from 3KV upwards,

the company is seriously targeting the government sector, oil sector, software

industry and the burgeoning photolabs industry. Today it boasts of large clients

like ITC, ONGC, BPCL, Wochardt, Nortel, Apollo Hospitals in Chennai and

photolabs of Kodak, Kaya, Fuji and Konica.

One reason for HiTA's decision to concentrate on niche domains is because

the margins exist only in higher-end UPSes and not the entry-level. Also, these

segments prefer buying UPSes for their mission-critical machines, only after

running some benchmarking tests. Claims Ghosh, "We can prove the technical

superiority of our product during these test rounds, as our UPS support has

voltage mentioned on the box, unlike other companies." While HiTA sells its

high-end UPS to niche verticals directly, the sub-3KVA products are sold through

its 45 partners nationally.

The company started a solution division called Digital Data Systems in 2000,

to make inroads into the IT business as well. An IBM partner, this division

concentrates on turnkey projects and is already contributing 10% to HiTA's

overall revenues.

One reason why Ghosh decided to get into the solutions business was because

he already had a good base of UPS customers to whom IT products could also be

sold as a package.

Also, he does not foresee a rosy future for the UPS market. Ghosh says that

Indian manufacturers are a dying breed, as the price differential between MNC

and local brands are steadily coming down. "Most local manufacturers simply

import knocked-down components from Taiwan, assemble them in India and sell them

under their brand name. But with the duties coming down, this is no longer a

lucrative business, especially in the entry- and mid-level products," he

adds. Also the supply chain for these components is not organized, which means

that spare parts are not always available.

Rajneesh De