Rashi Peripherals : Adding Value To Distribution

Mumbai-based Rashi Peripherals, which has always believed in having a

cautious approach while signing up vendors, went all out and tied up with five

companies in 2007-08, where usually it would get satisfied by adding only two or

three companies to its kitty annually. These alliances helped the company to

boost its turnover to Rs 668 crore last fiscal, 39 percent growth over the

previous year's Rs 480 crore. 72 percent of this business came from the reseller

and dealer community, while system integrators made up for 26 percent.

A first for the company was its biggest marketing programs till date, where

it reached out to 51 cities in the country. Named Trendz, this roadshow was the

company's initiative to popularize the brands it distributes and educate

partners about it, while also adding to its partner network. Besides this, it

also conducted service camps with training programs for the support personnel of

its partners.

Coming to accolades, Rashi won the Gladiator's Award for Best ODD and Overall

Excellence from Sony.

Last fiscal, the company outsourced its packing department, which was set-up

when the company used to import some of its products. The 30 percent manpower of

that division was absorbed into its sales team. This way the company managed to

control its manpower turnover rate. Most of the new recruits were engineers and

the overall attrition hovered at four percent.

8
Profile
CEO: Suresh Pansari Start-up year: 1989 Employees: 450 Collaborations: AMD, Altec Lansing, APC, Asus, Compex, HP, Leadtek, Lenovo, Logitech, HP Procurve, Prolink, Netgear, Sandisk, Senao, Sony, XFX Address: 102, Dhantak Plaza, Makwana Road, Marol, Andheri East, Mumbai - 400059 Tel: 022-67090909 Website: www.rptechindia.com SILVER CLUB RANK (2006-07): 8

The company took a conscious decision not to focus on its topline and took

initiatives which would shore its bottomline instead. A bulk of the revenue

still came from its component business, pitching in close to 30 percent to the

overall sales.

It started becoming aggressive in the networking space and tied up with

Nexans. The other tieups included Freecom, APC, Procurve and Leadtek. Most of

these names are not known in India, but Rashi believes that the systems

integrator community that it caters to is not brand conscious, but instead

expects strong service support.