Value added distributor Rashi Peripherals wants to focus on maturing its recently added mobile phone category before it moves to other product lines
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“Competition is far more in the branded one than in the component business.”
Kapal Pansari,
Director,
Rashi Peripherals
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The India IT distribution market is a tough one, fraught with challenges; many distributors have changed their strategy and become more of solution providers from mere box pushers in order to survive the harsh realities of the changing dynamics of the market. Therefore, it is no surprise that not many new players are entering the distribution business.
“The absence of new players entering this market is a sign that the industry is stagnating,” informs Kapal Pansari, Director, Rashi Peripherals. “This is the reason why in the last couple of years the channel segment has been consolidating.”
Rashi Peripherals started as a component and peripheral dependant organisation and without losing focus on it and to meet the changing market demands transformed itself by moving into other product categories for growth. Partners too have moved from component business to branded ones Pansari add but stresses, “Competition is far more in the branded one than in the component business.”
“In the component it’s the partners who are pushing the product while in the branded segment it’s the brand which is driving the product into the market,” he adds.
Recently Rashi added mobile as a new product line and will concentrate on maturing this product category. It’s also looking at other product categories like server and storage segment, software, enterprise class networking products to add into its portfolio. “We have not ventured into these but will soon start looking at them probably by next year,” says Pansari.
Pansari adds they are prepping themselves for Lenovo server (with the completion of integration IBM server), as they being their largest commercial distributor partner this product will fall in line with Rashi’s portfolio.
This year he hopes to touch Rs. 2000 crore in turnover.
With earlier modes of communication like email, SMS, telecallers no longer remaining the only means of effective marketing tools to reach out to partners and addressable customers Rashi has taken to Social Media marketing rather aggressively as part of its marketing strategy. With everybody on Facebook nowadays schemes are released on this media platform.
From billing point of view its channel base is 9000 partners but the total database number around 26000. In addition there are 51 branches across the country from sales point of view, and 57 service centers.
