Jitendra Kulkarni COO

START-UP YEAR: 1993;  NO OF PARTNERS: 6,200 BRANCHES: 28;  AGENCY OPERATIONS: HP, Epson, APC, Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, CA, IBM, Avaya, Kobian and Motorola ADDRESS: SPL Guindy House, 95, Mount Road, Guindy, Chennai;  TEL: 044-22353313;  FAX: 044-22300940 WEB SITE: www.redingtonindia.com

AGENCY REVENUE (RS Cr) MEASURES THAT MATTERED Tied up for Western Digital’s HDDs Invested in spare stocking points to strengthen services

Fiscal 2002-03 was eventful for Redington India. Along with the expansion of its product portfolio and geographies, Redington successfully expanded into new market segments. Most business lines grew, including component sales and packaged software.

This helped the company retain its #2 position in the Silver Club. However, the company's revenues dipped during the first quarter as a result of the uncertainties following the HP-Compaq merger.

Despite recording poor growth during the first quarter of the FY 2002-03, Redington gained momentum and closed the fiscal ending March 2003 with a turnover of Rs 1,609 crore.  This is a growth of about 19% against the previous year's performance of Rs 1,350 crore. 

In spite of recording a healthy growth, the company had a note of discord with its proposed merger with Global Tele-systems. GTL had announced an alliance with the Redington Group earlier this year and the two agreed to consolidate their business. The merger, however, found few believers and eventually it was called off. According to sources, the unstated reason behind calling off the merger, is the negative response of GTL's shareholders to the deal.

During last fiscal, Redington was also appointed as the service support provider for Western Digital's complete range of hard disks. Though this decision was made in the last quarter of 2002, it was made public only during the fiscal 2002-03. Today, Redington caters to Western Digital's channel through its Chennai center. The company also signed-up an exclusive tie-up with HP for managing the company's technical support call center for consumer desktops.

Redington represents more than 15 leading global brands covering product categories like systems, software, peripherals, components, networking products and mobile phones. Today Redington sells to more than 6,000 customers including VARs, system integrators, GIDs, government resellers, corporate resellers, retailers, OEMs and e-tailers.

The company also expanded its product portfolio and brought in Avaya's networking products and Kobian's Mercury motherboards. Redington also added IBM's RS6000 UNIX servers on the enterprise front.  

The 2002-03 fiscal also saw Redington investing in setting up spare stocking points across India. This was a move by the company to strengthen its server sales and services across the country. As a distributor, Redington has a wide reach, efficient operations necessary for high volumes and good service capabilities. These favoring factors have helped Redington to emerge as an important distributor to the assembler segment.

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