By Sharmee Roy
Salora International aims to boosts its IT business in 2009 by strengthening its IT distribution portfolio and launching its own brand of products.
“It has taken us a year to shape our IT business. We already have strong PC brands in our portfolio and now our focus is to add more peripheral brands. We are also in the final stage of signing a collaboration deal with a UPS vendor to start manufacturing of branded products. The manufacturing is expected to start in the next three months,” said Pawan Kapur, Executive Advisor, Salora International.
Over the last one year the company has signed up pacts with PC vendors like Acer, Lenovo, Zenith and Fujitsu, and in the peripherals space it distributes Moser Baer and Samsung for its Pleomax brand of PC accessories and storage media.
“We became Lenovo’s regional distributor six months back, and have been recently appointed national distributor for Zenith. With a strong PC portfolio, our focus in 2009 is to add leading peripherals brands” said Kapur.
Under its distribution business, Salora has three separate verticals–Telecom, Consumer Electronics and IT. Under the telecom vertical, it is regional distributor for Sony Ericsson and Virgin Mobile, while under the CE vertical it has tie-ups with iRiver for memory and accessories, Pandigital for digital frames, Fusion for car audio systems, Teac for LCDs and audio systems, and with Moser Baer for their range of consumer digital products.
In FY 2007-08, Salora recorded a turnover of Rs 1,120 crore, of which nearly 75 percent came from telecom and the rest came from consumer electronics and IT business. “For the current fiscal, we want to increase the contribution from the IT vertical. We expect 55 percent revenues to come from telecom and 45 percent from IT and CE. Our aim is to become a billion dollar company in three years,” informed Kapur.
The company plans to expand its branch presence in 2009. It currently has 28 branches and plans to open seven more.
In 2009, Salora’s big focus would also be retail. “We forayed into retail last September with our brand of stores called Terminal. We have opened 10 retail outlets in Delhi and NCR region. These stores sell all digital products encompassing telecom, IT and CE goods. We intend to add more stores in the North and later to other regions,” added Kapur. |