Telecom Lead India: VMC Systems, India’s own telecom
equipment and power conversion product manufacturer, has annual revenue Rs
1,100 crore. VMC currently derives 70 per cent of its revenues from
transmission equipment.
VMC’s Telecom business unit provides an array of
specialized telecom products and services to leading telecom companies and OEM
customers. B. Venkataramana, executive director of VMC Systems
talks about the company’s 4G and 3G plans:
What are your plans to cash in on the 4G rollouts in
India? What are your offerings for 3G?
4G roll-out is still at a very nascent stage in
India. The deployment and availability is still few and far in between.
From an access technology perspective 3G is still ramping in the market
place. We are in the process of getting our 3G USB dongles qualified at a
few operators, and hope to reach market penetration before end of this
year.
What are your expansion and investment plans for India
and global market? Kindly highlight your R&D strategies?
We are expanding our production facilities aggressively;
and we expect to quadruple this by this year end. This steps from factors
such as good market traction and customer retentions strategies, coupled with
an aggressive sales push in the domestic market.
R&D has been a contributor to our growth, and will
continue to play a key-role in our expansion plans. We continue to expand
our portfolio, both horizontally as well as vertically. For example in
the past two years alone, we’ve introduced 7 versions of Media Converters
[horizontal], as well as introduced a completely new product-line for HV
industrial-grade DC Power Supplies [vertical]. We continue to be the
harbinger of quality and reliability in the domestic Power Supplies market,
where we’ve introduced CE certifications across most of our power adaptor
range, in addition to our UL compliant PC power systems [ATX].
With such aggressive investments and expansion plans,
penetration into the global markets is inevitable.
As a manufacturer, how do you see India becoming a global
hub for telecom manufacturing in future?
Almost all major MNCs have their R&D centers here in
India. This was initially an off-shore development strategy, but today
more and more of these MNCs see that their R&D centers will be key to
penetrate the domestic market, making India specific products their primary
directives. Therefore it is inevitable that the next step to acquiring
local markets would be to locally manufacture those products designed here in
India. Also, Indian manufacturers such as us are investing in product
development so that we can, as an OEM, compete for a share in this domestic
market.
What are the challenges and opportunities in the Indian
and global market?
The Indian market is considered one of the largest
telecom sectors in the world, and the fastest, a statement attested by TRAI’s
report that India has crossed the 0.9 billion mark for mobile
subscribers. The next wave of demand will be broadband, be it mobile or
fixed broadband. Today, with less than 15 million users, India is at a
mere 2.5 percent of the total 600 million active users that the India has
envisioned as the total broadband subscribers in India by 2020. This
surge in broadband in the access segment will create a bottleneck in the
network core, where infrastructure will eventually need to be upgraded.
This will create tremendous opportunity for telecom growth in India.
From a challenges perspective, a very nascent component
eco-system, and relatively weaker infrastructure [roads, clean power, etc], as
compared to some of the global manufacturing hubs, coupled with lower barriers
of entry for cheap and inferior imports needs to addressed firmly and quickly.
What are your products and services for the telecom
industry in India?
Our products cover the entire gamut of telecom
network. In the Customer Premise of CPE category, we have ADSL CPE, Media
Converters [MC] in FE and Gig-E range, WiMAX indoor and outdoor units, and
Smart L2 switches. In the Access or Aggregation layer, we have Interface
converters such as Ethernet-over-TDM, and MC Chassis. In the Edge layer
we have ADMs ranging from STM1 through STM16. We also offer complete end-to-end
solutions in GPON, where we have both the OLT and the ONT. Where we do
not have a direct product (today), we work with our partners to give complete
solutions, such as DWDM and DXC, including Carrier Ethernet.
How has been the company’s performance? What are the
strategies to increase the revenue?
Since our incorporation in 2003, we’ve been growing at a
pace of over 50 percent year on year. Our strategy has been simple,
listen to our customers, build the right product solutions, and deliver quality
product to customers. This is the core of our culture, and we believe
this to be our drivers for success.
Danish Khan
[email protected]
