UMS Infotech banks on retail

N R Sethuraman

Chennai

March 14th, 2008

The latest entrant into the retail segment is Chennai based sub distributor
UMS Infotech who plans to start of the retail operations within a month and open
four more showrooms across Chennai in a year's time. "We would start our
retail operations form Velachery in Chennai and have proposed to start four more
outlets across the city by the end of the year. This outlet will have exclusive
products of HP and other leading products too," said R.Kumar, Director UMS
Infotech. He further added, "Margins are shrinking day by day and balancing
the credit issues is becoming a another major challenge everyday. We don't have
any such issues in the retail. It is evident with the amount of players entering
the space and managing it successfully," he said. Since UMS has a strong
product portfolio, it would be able to stock products regularly according to
customer's requirements without any issues, Kumar informed. "We have been
working with channels all these years and we would continue to work with them.
Our focus in retail would not affect our channel business in any way, as these
both are completely different segments, which will not clash with each
other," Kumar added. He foresees a lot more players in the industry
foraying into retail segment within this year. "Over the period of time
LFR's have strongly emerged and only those players in the retail industry would
be able to survive for a long time as the sub distribution business is gradually
becoming l tough. Due to these facts one can see a lot more players coming into
retail by the end of this year," said Kumar. He also said that being a sub
distributor, having a retail shop is always an advantage, as one can showcase
the entire portfolio to end users and also new products can be easily added and
marketed according to their interest. He informed that UMS has been growing by
25 percent every YOY, where both laptops and peripherals segment has been the
key contributors. UMS has planned to focus more aggressively on laptops and has
tied up with Acer for the same. "The overall market share of the desktops
has seen a dip and this has made us to focus more in the laptops segment.
However we would continue to focus on peripherals segment too besides
laptops," Kumar informed.