With Ingram gobbling up Tech Pacific, the distribution business in India has become bipolar with battle lines drawn between Ingram and Redington. Redington, it seems, has enough ammo to challenge Ingram. A look at the year gone by demonstrates the company's strengths in the distribution business. Overall it was a good fiscal for Chennai-based Redington India, which showed a 43% growth, up from 16% last year.

Growth came from different product lines cutting across systems and peripherals, which constituted 63% of its total revenues. New product lines also saw good traction-such as Zenith PCs, Acer consumer desktops and portables, and BenQ notebooks. Products added include the HP Indigo hig-end print products, Xerox printers and copiers, and Philips monitors.

HIGHLIGHTS Good growth in systems and peripherals $24 mn investment from Synnex Mobile handset business drops 61% Embarked on infrastructure augmentation Ability to manage both MNC and Indian products with ease Unable to sustain its mobile business   Needs to up its ante on networking products   Now faces much larger, aggressive (post-merger) Ingram Micro l CEO: Jitendra Kulkarni l Start-up Year: 1993 l Product & Services: Distributor of PCs, servers, peripherals, consumables, mobile handsets, networking equipment and tech support l Branches: 33 l Dealers: 7679 l Address: SPL Guindy House, 95, Mount Road, Chennai-600032 l Tel: 52243535 l Fax: 22352790 l Website: www.redingtonindia.com Jitendra

Last year saw an organizational restructuring. Redington India has now become the holding company with two entities-Redington Middle East and Singapore-under it. This change was driven by an investment of $24 mn by Synnex (a $10 bn company, the third largest global distributor of IT products). Synnex is based out of Taiwan and has presence in Australia, Hong Kong, and China. Investing in Redington, Synnex manages to gain foothold into the Middle East and Indian markets. Moreover, the investments will enable Synnex to leverage its products like PCs and other IT products manufactured by Asustek Computer, its strategic partner, through Redington. Meanwhile, using Synnex's capabilities Redington will beef up its logistics management.

The dampener however was the mobile business. Redington managed only Rs 84 crore out of the Motorola mobiles, as against Rs 220 crore in FY 2003-04. The reason, the company says, is because the market is polarized towards Nokia. Meanwhile on the components side, Redington made Rs 337 crore from Intel CPUs and Rs 65 crore from Intel motherboards.

The year also saw Redington adding 1,131 dealer outlets and four branch offices. It also made major investments on improving its infrastructure like warehouses and service centers. With the economy doing well, with consolidations within the industry, and with several new distribution opportunities opening up, the company sees a healthy business growth for the ongoing fiscal.