40. Elcom Trading Company Ltd New Products For Growth

Last year Elcom Trading Company Ltd stopped the import of Intel chipset-based motherboards and Cyrix processors to focus and consolidate its product portfolio. This was with a view to provide an efficient after-sales support and to build it as a core strength for the company. And also to build a channel base that reciprocates the support.

The core products of the company have been narrowed down to Seagate hard disk drives, Intel processors and motherboards. It is because of this focus that Elcom Trading is today the Seagate import partner in the northern region. "Because of our imports, we can offer the best price in the market, sometimes at par with the international market," says Sunil

Narang, Director.

The change in the sales tax structure hit the company hard last year. As a consequence of the sales tax going up by two percent to four percent the company lost out on a number of up-country clients. A targeted turnover of Rs 65 crore was missed by a huge margin. Elcom Trading did only Rs 43

crore.

During the course of the year, Elcom tied up with Microsoft to become its exclusive stockist for hardware retail products for Northern India. This alliance brings Microsoft keyboards, mouse and gaming products to Elcom's portfolio. It has also tied up to distribute Via Cyrix processors, the import of which, Elcom discontinued during the first half of the year. Narang works with the philosophy of adding products that require a greater effort to sell. "We prefer to work with products that require more efforts, so margins are better and we have scope to show our potential," says he. Elcom has increased its sales force by two to develop business for Microsoft products in the up-country markets.

For the days ahead, Elcom is taking the conservative approach. With better inventory planning, it is looking at doing business equal to last year. "Even if we maintain the same turnover and the market having slowed down by 35 percent we would have relatively grown by that percentage," says

Narang.