Neoteric had a busy year, striking new alliances and consolidating existing ones. Its revenues grew by 30 percent to touch an estimated Rs 120 crore in 2001-02. This growth came about because of Director Paras Shah's approach of doing business conservatively at a time when the market was in a recessionary phase, and spreading risks by taking up more products.
In February 2002, Samsung signed up Neoteric as its fifth wholesaler. Under the agreement, the latter will distribute certain range of products including 7,200 rpm drives, 15-inch SyncMaster TFT monitors, 17-inch flat screen monitors, laser printers, CD-RWs, combo drives and DVD drives.
For Neoteric, niche-selling is not new. Its other tie-ups include Apple and Kodak, which have specialized products and some of them are at an early stage of market acceptance. Another new alliance was with Apcom, which appointed Neoteric as its authorized distributor for Dax modems in the western and eastern regions. This is the first time that the company appointed an exclusive distributor for Dax modems. Adaptec was another company that came into the distributor's fold.
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In 2001, Umax dropped Summit Infotech and decided to continue its partnership with Neoteric, appointing them as their sole distributor in the country. In a bid to gain customerґs confidence, it even authorized Neoteric to look after the servicing issues.
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Last April, Philips Electronics and Neoteric parted ways, bringing to end a three-year old partnership. The decision was taken after Philips favored a regional distribution network over the national distribution model.
Now that it has a strong portfolio of products, Neoteric is training its sights on spreading its national presence. It plans to open eight new branch offices in India by end of 2002. To start off with, it opened an office in Surat recently. The other earmarked locations are Bhubaneshwar, Dehradun, Guwahati, Noida, Pondicherry, Raipur and Ranchi.