Iris aspires to become 'Distributor of Choice'

Delhi based national distributor Iris Computers has been aggressively growing its revenue year-on- year, despite the slowdown in the IT industry. With registering a robust growth, the company has set an objective to be a 'Distributor of Choice' amongst its channel partners and principal companies. To gain this title in its portfolio, the distributor has even started taking two pronged strategies which are organic and inorganic.

Speaking to The DQ Week , IT veteran Sanjiv Krishen, chairman, Iris Computers said, "Today, everybody is talking about slowdown, even if we look at the worldwide projections notebooks and desktops to have a negative growth from 7to 13%, that is the expected deduction in revenues. Having said that, we are not experiencing this slowdown, last year we grew by 47% from almost Rs 1,200 crore, we reached to Rs1,600 crore in FY 12-13, that growth is quite substantial in a market which is slowing down. While PCs and notebooks may slowdown, there are other technologies and products like big displays, tablets and smartphones are growing high and revenues are building up. In the current scenario, we are getting orders from education vertical for notebook. This year we are targeting Rs 2,000 crore revenue in 2013-14.

For Iris, small states like Assam, Himachal Pradesh and Goa are buying big quantities of notebooks. Besides education, Iris has been supplying huge volume of Samsung large format displays to the airport modernization projects. The distributor through its resellers has supplied displays at 23 airports of India under the airport modernization project.

There is a growth story in education and infrastructures be it modernization of airports and CCTNS. In terms of vendors contribution in Iris growth. The biggest vendor is Lenovo, last year 52% growth came from Lenovo, Samsung grew by 160%, HCL grew by 48% and ATEIS was at 131%, an audio- system firm, wherein other vendors like IBM, Dell and Numeric did decent growth.

The another growth area for Iris is inorganic route, in this year, the company has further diversified into security solutions and components. It has tied up with Sagem Morpho, a French based manufacture of Iris scanning and fingerprints reading. The distributor has got an order of 1000 kit,from CSC service provider for UID project. Additionally, it has added Western Digital hard drives in to its portfolio.

"We have now entered into component and security business, up till now we were distributing finished products, with Western Digital, we are expecting doing a Rs 25 crore business in a month. Up till now, we were restricting our limits to systems business, which include notebooks, desktops, servers as the bank limits were the major constraint. We have now found a foreign investors and they have assured us bank limits wont be a problem, thus with the funding will double our bank limits."

To overcome the funding constraints, Iris has tied up with global investor company Inflexion Point, a global focused IT supply chain company of South Asia. "We have already tied up with Inflexion Point, we have sold 8% of Iris share and this partnership will bring in more funds. They have already put in Rs 8 crore funding last year and now they will propel Rs 100 crore."

Inflextion point wanted to expand in South East Asia, in Singapore, the investor has tied up with Dragon distribution and in India they have selected Iris computers. With funding coming in, Iris is further expanding its reach geographical and channel base. It is opening five new offices in this year.

Commenting on the 'Distributor of Choice' plan, Krishen said, "We are growing faster than big guys like Ingram and Redington. There is no fear of slowdown. The issue before us is to how we make sure that dealers are buying from us not from big distributors, so to compete over our competitors and in the market. Our goal is to be the 'distributors of choice' whenever a dealers get an order, he should think of Iris, we want to give value additions to the dealers. And our numbers are proving that we are growing much faster than our principals. We believe credit should not be a reason holding the dealers materiel. By and large our credit approvals are more liberals. We are adding value addition and offering more flexible credit evaluations all the time."