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Jalandhar, Punjab
Jalandhar, located in Punjab, is well known for its production of traditional Indian sweets, sports equipment, leather goods and rubber goods, and auto parts. The city hosts many major leather manufacturers, the largest being Gee Kay International who supply a variety of leather products ranging from garments to tool bags around the world. It also hosts many major sports equipment manufacturers such as Bas, JJ Jonex, Soccer International, Spartan and F C Sondhi. It is also famous for its surgical tool industry and claims to have the biggest printing industry in India.
The city is seeing an increasing growth of technology investment, with headquarters and operational centres from the likes of Dell and Microsoft being set up.
Channel Scenario
Jalandhar has a small channel community comprising 70-100 resellers selling an average more than 1000 PCs per month. The city has a 10-year old channel representative body called Jalandhar Computers Dealers Association (JCDA) having 70 members. The association regularly organizes meetings, training programs and tours for its members.
Opportunities
Traditionally, the government sector and corporates are the largest IT spenders, followed by home and SOHO segment accounting for nearly 60 percent of the total demand. Jalandhar is also faster than its peers in adopting new technologies. According to Paresh Beri of Impel Infosys, printers and scanner are the highly demanded products in hospitals. The company is a regional distributor for Canon products and every month does a business of more than Rs 25 lakhs. “High-end printers, MFDs, laser printers and scanners are amongst the most demanded ones. Imaging market is growing at a rate of 100 percent year-over-year,” says Beri.
The buoyancy of the local GDP has led to increased consumer, SOHO and SMB demand over the past two years. The home IT products in particular have been growing at over 50 percent every year.
High-end gaming PCs are in vogue among a large number of home users and the sales of gaming consoles like Xbox and Play Station is also on the rise. “This has opened new vistas for business mainly for the gaming peripherals and high-end display and computers. Consumers are even ready to spend Rs 10,000 for a graphic card,” says Beri.
Wi-Fi solutions are also growing in demand not just among large manufacturing firms but even in small businesses and homes.
On the government front, several state economic development departments are driving up IT demand.
Challenges
The buoyant IT market in Jalandhar has meant an influx of small and unorganized resellers, who are giving tough competition to dealers. Arshad Ali, owner of Sky Computers, complains about the absence of price uniformity in the market due to unregistered resellers. He says, “They can easily escape from taxes such as profession tax and VAT, and hence are able to cut down costs incurred in setting up and maintaining a big shop.”
Profile
Paresh Ablakshya
Director,
Impel Infosys
The three musketeers
In the late 90s, three friends, fresh from college, were looking for a smart way to earn their pocket money. Their quest ended with an offer to set up modems in a local office in Jalandhar. “We had to set up modems and build systems for them with a commitment to service their PCs every month,” recalls Paresh Ablakshya, one of the three directors of Impel Infosys. The other two directors are Manish Nagpal and Terry Sandhu.
Company Snapshot | | Company | Impel Infosys | | CEO | Paresh Ablakshya | | Year of Inception | 1998 | | Brands | Dell, Lenovo, Intel, Seagate, Samsung, D-link, Netgear, AMD, Asus, Canon, Toshiba, Sony, Frontek | Primary Business | Reseller, sub-distributor | | Employees | 30 | Turnover in 2007 | Rs. 27 Crore |
Abhlakshya adds, “This contract boosted confidence within ourselves, and decided to try for another contract. We even went to Shimla to obtain an AMC contract. Although, we did not get it, we realized that we wanted to take this business further and this is how Impel Infosys came into being.”
As the demand for hardware increased, the company changed gears from providing services to sub-distribution, system building and also reselling. “There wasn’t any proper distribution channel in the city, due to this we often had to buy products from Delhi. We understood that we could increase the revenues of our business if we took up sub-distribution for the city. This is when we decided to venture into sub-distribution; we obtained our first contract from Jupiter International for their Frontek brand of cabinets and peripherals,” informs Ablakshya.
After about a decade, the company has added more products and customers to its kitty. Today, Impel Infosys are the regional distributors for Canon, Frontek, Luminous and is also an Intel Premium Partner. It has two divisions—one for sub-distribution that contributes to about 60 percent of the revenues and another for reselling. The reselling division has three sub-units, one that deals with corporate resale, the second deals with retail and the third deals with system building. Corporate reselling and retail accounts for 10 percent each, while the rest comes from system building.
In 2005, Impel opened a 500 sq ft multi-brand retail store, which helped the company to double its turnover that year. It plans to open another store in the city, and is also planning to branch out to south Punjab soon. |