24. Wellwin Industry Ltd: Product Range Enhanced

MD: R Rajagopalan START-UP YEAR: 1998 NO OF PARTNERS: 400 PRODUCTS & SERVICES: Components and peripherals AGENCY OPERATIONS: Seagate, Mercury and Acer ADDRESS: First Floor, 104 Arihant Towers, VTN Square GN Chetty Road, T Nagar, Chennai 600 017 TEL: 044-8284217/8217207-09 FAX: 044-8284218 WEBSITE: http://www.wellwin-india.com/   POINTERS TO PERFORMANCE Reached out to four new cities Over 225 new partners signed up POINTERS TO FUTURE Diversifying into value-added products Looking for partners to sell to corporates and solution providers

Wellwin Industry Ltd (WIL) was on a tie-up signing spree during 2000-01, with principals such as Elsa Asia Inc, Tekram Technology Corp, Aver Media Technologies and Transcend Inc, to increase its product range. These alliances brought in products which included high-end graphic cards, SCSI controllers, TV tuner cards, PAL converters, PC cameras, presentation products and server motherboards. 

However, the overall growth suffered. Going by last year's market conditions, WIL wanted to grow 100 percent every year. But that was not to be. The distributor which had seen a 82 percent growth during 1999-00, had to be satisfied with 65 percent during 2000-01 and has got stuck at last year's 24th rank in the Silver Club. 

Sudhir S, GM, says that the the slowdown did affect the growth projections. But otherwise there was no great impact on WIL. In fact, he says, "We rather made use of the slowdown to expand our reach and increase our customer base substantially." The result was that WIL opened five offices in four new cities and 225 new partners were signed up.

A bulk of the revenue came from the Seagate and Mercury range. While motherboards from Mercury contributed Rs 30 crore, HDDs from Seagate brought in Rs 24 crore. Acer's keyboards, scanners and CD-ROMs also did well.

WIL saw the highest growth in the sales of TV tuner cards and PC cameras. The scanners moved in the home segment. Partners lifted high-end graphic cards and 815 chipset motherboards with AGP slots in large numbers.

The second half of the financial year was some 20 percent slower than the first half, which resulted in an overall slackness in growth. There was also shortage of CPUs followed by HDD shortage putting a break on revenues.

Efforts were made to balance the product mix by diversifying into value-added products which contributed to the profitability as well. Sudhir says that WIL is looking at consolidating its strengths in their areas of operations besides expanding into newer markets. 

WIL has already moved into new products by signing up with LG Electronics, Samsung Electro Mechanics and Accton Technology. Says Sudhir, "These new tie-ups and the new range of products will help us fight the slowdown. We already feel that we have come out of the slowdown!"

Sudhir has plans to go beyond the channel segment and reach out to corporates, solution providers and the VARs. WIL continues to see high potential in SOHO and wants to introduce products that are relevant to this segment.