Beetel Dials for IT

href="http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Reliance-BIG-TV-ties-up-with-Beetel-Teletech/142518/0/">Beetel
Teletech, a Bharti group
company, has recently broadened its business canvas by foraying into
the IT peripheral space, launching a complete range of Beetel-branded
products spanning across nine categories, covering the entire gamut
of IT peripherals for PCs. The range includes products like woofers,
headphones, monitors, webcams, keyboards, mouse as well as
channel-centric products like cabinets, UPS, and TV tuner cards. The
Beetel-branded product range provides the consumer an opportunity to
buy an aspirational Indian brand, offering a distinct advantage on
two key parameters-quality and service. The products provide an
impressive feature list at similar prices to competition, thereby
promising the consumer more
value for money.

This development can be termed as one
of the biggest achievements for a company that has been a pioneer in
the telephony space, especially as a manufacturer of landline phones.
For long, Beetel has been admired as a sales and distribution company
for technology products but this advancement is expected to certainly
recreate the Beetel brand in the technology space. “We are
essentially a technology company and have product ranges in the
telecom and IT space. Apart from being India's most admired company
in the landline telephone space, we have been distributors for iconic
brands like BlackBerry, Apple, Avaya, Polycom, Samsung, Sanyo,
Panasonic, Transcend, Iomega, Aastra Telecom, RAD Data Comm, Actelis,
and Strontium. It was a natural progression for us to enter the IT
peripherals space with a product range under our own Beetel brand
name,” said Vinod Sawhny, Executive Director and CEO, Beetel
Teletech. The company is of the opinion that as a sales and
distribution company, it has been impacting the IT industry through
the distribution of products for SMEs and corporates. So, entering
into the peripherals business was very much logical. Moreover,
according to Beetel estimates, it was found that entry into this
segment was a Rs 5,000 crore opportunity, besides it being a
recession proof market.

According to Sawhny, the IT
peripherals market is growing at a rate of around 10 percent on a YoY
basis with the feature of a 'hugely fragmented market'. Besides,
only a couple of large players are operating in the market
simultaneously dotted by the presence of numerous small players.
Today, it is largely left to an organization like Beetel to establish
its distribution across the country and leverage its brand for
peripherals to work. And for this, the focus has to be on the design
capability, and credibility and reliability of the brand. “In this
space, I can't think of any name that comes from a trusted house.
To some extent, HCL is present in the Indian market but that too, is
not heavily into peripherals business. Otherwise, there are many small
time
players in the market or there may be a few MNC brands, which may not
be fully relevant to the country, both in terms of price and
availability. So, Beetel is trying to find a national space in the IT
peripherals market here in India,” added Sawhny. The company is
quite upbeat about its success in the Indian market. Since Beetel has
been a part of the IT space as a distribution company, it will not be
difficult for the company to establish the brand 'Beetel' in the
IT space. Besides, it is known as a technology company offering
relevant and quality solutions. “We already have access to the
channel, plus the consumer knows and trusts us. This gives us an
advantage in establishing ourselves in a market such as this. Our
positioning is for the Indian masses. Our product range is designed
to cater to the requirements of our customers and delight them on
quality and design. Besides, we have the most
competitively priced products. Above all, the Beetel brand name, with
the backing of Bharti, is trusted by Indian consumers,” added
Sawhny. Moreover, Sawhny is also of the view that IT peripherals is
one space that works irrespective of whether it is a local or an MNC
brand as consumers look at the affordability of peripherals and
Beetel as a brand is capable of giving them good quality and
well-designed products at an affordable price. Consumers might shell
out huge money for notebooks and other
products, but for peripherals, they might go for products that are more
cost-effective. So, the
company's motto is to provide quality at a lower price.

In order to taste success in this
space, Beetel is banking heavily on its distribution channel to
penetrate deep into the Indian market.
In large cities, however, it is focusing on direct dealership. Today,
it has more than 1,000 dealers across the country dealing with the
entire range of product line. However, only 25 percent of the
existing channel will be utilized for this new business opportunity,
the rest 75 percent will comprise of new channel partners. On the
other hand, it has started getting into the SME channel, as the
company sees huge peripheral requirements in this space. The company
is also looking at how it can work with
corporate sales channels to reach out to the SMEs. It has also
partnered with the modern trade channel ie LFRs across the country.
Besides, in order to address the servicing issues, it has already
established over
150 service centers across 130 cities of the country with an
estimated turn-around-time of four working days to the maximum. “If
your products are of good quality, competitively priced and come with
service back up, the customers start to believe in what you commit.
Right now, our focus is on making the products available on pan India
basis and also on creating trust amongst consumers. We want to make
sure that our service centers are available to all the places where our
products are
available,” concluded Sawhny.