Bartronics India plans to open 12 branches across country

City-based Bartronics India Limited, a leading provider of automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) technologies in the Indian market, plans to open 12 branches across the country by December 2005. The company also plans to invest Rs 5 crore into research and development activities.

The company is also looking at increasing its headcount from the present 65 to 100 in the next two years.

Speaking to Business Standard, Bartronics India managing director Sudhir Rao said, "The company expects to raise Rs 20 crore in the next six months to fund the company's international as well as domestic expansion plans." Cipher Securities (India) Private Limited would be the fund managers, he added.

Apart from this, Bartronics also plans to focus on the growth in exports and on providing solutions in the biometrics and securities sectors. The Rs 12.5-crore company is riding a boom in the demand for its solutions and is expecting a 50 per cent jump this fiscal.

The company is also bullish on the growth of the radio identification technology devices (RFID). "The RFID market in India is slated to grow at a rapid pace over the next two years to around Rs 100 crore," he said.

The company, which had done projects worth Rs 40 lakh last fiscal, expects the revenue inflow from this division to contribute significantly this fiscal. "We have already initiated 43 projects and are expecting a few more," Rao said.

RFID solutions can be deployed in container tracking, vehicle tracking, tollgate management, access control and ladle tracking amongst other uses. RFID devices use identification tags with microchips embedded in them. These chips emanate signals that uniquely identify them and by affixing these chips to any object, it can be identified and tracked.

According to him, studies showed that the RFID usage in the country is expected to cross $85 million by the end of 2004 and would see a compound annual growth rate of 18-20 per cent. The retail segment by 2010 would be the major sector to use this technology by contributing around 20 per cent of the sales.

Rao said that the company expects the exports income to touch Rs 3 crore by the end of the current fiscal. "We, at the moment, have exports orders from Bangladesh, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Dubai. We would be concentrating on these areas for the next two years and after that we would be looking at expanding our export countries," he said. The company is also looking at increasing its headcount from the present 65 to 100 in the nest two years.

Bartronics, which kicked off operations in 1989, has moved towards offering the second generation AIDC technologies, which can be used to address applications like bar coding, magnetic strips, smart cards, proximity cards, biometrics and radio frequency identification.

The AIDC solutions can be used to offer applications like time and attendance registers, access control, job costing, canteen management, asset tracking, production tracking, warehouse management, inventory control, document tracking, route distribution and goods control and dispatch management.