6. INFRASTRUCTURE: Set In Place

SES Technologies had to "slog it out" to grow by six percent during 2001-02. "It was a bad year and we had to put our best efforts to ensure that we did not have negative or flat growth," says PK Krishnaprasad, CEO. And perhaps these efforts helped as far as DQCI Silver Club rankings were concerned where SES climbed up one notch to #6 from #7 last year.

The positive development for SES during the year was the installation of an ERP system in the company. This has enabled SES to have a robust infrastructure that will support its growth in the coming years.

In a year, when demand was not forthcoming, SES implemented strict credit control policies and did not have major payment problems. It adhered to the 14-day credit period religiously. "If a reseller wants to do business, he has to do it with his own money and not with distributor's money!" opines Krishna
prasad.

SES is going strong on networking products since Krishnaprasad believes they have a promising future. Hence, SES looked for a vendor who could offer an entire range of products in this segment and signed up with Compex as its distributor. This tie-up will widen the networking products basket of SES which was already distributing Molex products.

Intel remained the mainstay of products for SES bringing in 70 percent of the total revenue. "Intel supports us in every way since it believes that everyone at SES works on an entrepreneurship basis," points out Krishnaprasad. Being the sole distributor of Dialogic products also helped in keeping the bottomline healthy.

White boxes was another area where SES focused with success. Intel servers were sold in large numbers. Networking and white boxes together contributed almost 10-15 percent of the revenues.

MEASURES THAT BROUGHT MOOLAH: Focus on networking products White box selling brought in 10-15 percent of rev

Assembling of notebooks has begun in its Pondicherry facility which has a ISO 9000 certification. Pondicherry was a tax haven since it was zero percent sales tax territory. Now with the uniform tax regime in the offing, Krishnaprasad feels the company will have to change its pricing strategies.

SES currently has all the building blocks of a PC except the monitors. It is in talks with Benq to sign up for its monitors. Krishnaprasad believes the deal will come through in the near future.

Once the distribution of all the building blocks is in place and the demand picks up, Krishnaprasad is confident that SES should get back to its three-digit growth figures.