Artek clocked an impressive 53% revenue growth clocking a turnover of Rs 52 crore in 2004-05. The solution provider has three main business divisions-channels, turnkey projects and direct marketing.

The channels division chipped in Rs 30 crore in 2004-05, while Rs 12 crore was generated from turnkey projects. Rs 9 crore came from direct marketing division and Rs 1 crore from AMC contracts.

Networking and IT services continued to be the mainstay of the company. Artek included Sun Technologies to its portfolio last fiscal and is an authorized distributor for D-link products. Last fiscal it partnered with Bharti for selling high-speed lease lines.

D-Llink, Cisco, MroTek, RAD and Nortel were top vendors for its distribution business. D-Link products contributed business worth Rs 25 crore. The company is concentrating to focus more on new areas like Security, Broadband, VoIP, surveillance system and wireless areas from this year.

Last fiscal Artek deployed several large projects like the LAN network at IIT Kanpur; D-Link wireless LAN and surveillance system at Rashtrapati Bhawan; VoIP network Ministry of Power; ADSL/VDSL LAN at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and LAN-WAN Network at MP pollution control board. It also provided the network backbone for the UTS ticketing infrastructure for the Northern Railway.

This fiscal, the company will focus more on the defense, education, railway and government segments and expects to bag expects 15-20 projects from these verticals. It is also thrusting on call center and corporate sectors.

Artek has a customer base of over 200 resellers and is mulling on adding 100 more partners this fiscal to strengthen its channel base. Artek also opened its Ranchi branch last year and will add two more offices in Kolkata and Chennai by the end of 2005.

The solution provider places great emphasis on training employees and spends roughly Rs 2.5 lakh annually for upgrading its manpower skillsets. It has more than 30 engineers who are trained in the latest technologies and have to attain minimum certification levels from principal companies. At the same time, even its marketing team is given some technical training to
equip them better when they pitch for contracts.

Since the first network installation in 1980s, Artek has done networking for some 400 sites, has installed over one lakh nodes and done about one lakh meters of cabling. It does not believe in diversifying in to other business segments. It will concentrate only on networking business so as to provide the best of solutions in the communications area.

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