Mediaman Group: Lying low

Mediaman Group of Companies managed to grow its agency revenues by just 11%
to touch Rs 125 crore in 2004-05, up from Rs 113 crore in the previous year. An
additional 20% revenues came from its own brand, Bravish, under which the
company added new products like MP3 players.

Storage-related or Flash-memory based products contributed nearly 20% to the
topline. Transcend, Gigabyte and Acard contributed nearly 60% to its agency
revenues. Transcend was the strongest principal for Mediaman, garnering 40% to
its overall revenues. Gigabyte servers brought another 10%, while Acard followed
by chipping in 8%.

The company also dabbled in lesser known brands in the laptop accessory
business. Incidentally, it was this particular market that gave a fillip to the
company's bottomline.

Laptop accessory business is a largely unorganized segment, where investments
are low and margins are higher. Baring a couple of well-known vendors like
Targus, there are not many reputed brands in this segment. Therefore Mediaman
trained its sight on this market, which requires smart inventory management as
the basic skillset. It has nearly 600 products in this space, including
batteries, adaptors, PCMCIA, USB, Bluetooth, Firewire and IRDA.

Mediaman undertook awareness campaigns against fake Transcend memory modules,
and even released a list of suspected sellers of these counterfeits. It expanded
its Transcend range by launching Photo Bank digital album and the wireless
JetFlash device.

The only tie-up Mediaman had was with Schindler, a German company, to make
available HP laser printer spare parts at prices less than 50% of the original
HP price. The spare parts include a list of 32 components, which were made
available through Mediaman's regular network of partners.

Mediaman created three divisions-systems integrators, resellers and direct-to
take its products to the market. This is the first time the company decided to
go direct, as it found that customers from several verticals preferred buying
directly from distributors, who could offer post-sales support.