BPL to merge components units

The beleaguered BPL Group is merging its three main component companies "" BPL Engineering, Electronic Research Private Limited, BPL Display Devices "" in an effort to boost its sagging fortunes.

The consumer electronics group is also bringing in its printed circuit board plant, currently under BPL Ltd, to this entity. With this it hopes to work its way into this high growth colour televisions and white goods components arena.

BPL Group is seeing this as a strategic business and the component business group is a result of the increasing need for quality components for consumer durables.

BPL expects to leverage on the group's manufacturing expertise, design, development and engineering skills.

This business is expected to be group's second focus area after it managed to spin off its colour television business into a separate joint venture with Sanyo, raking in $70 million for the same.

Together, the component business group companies of BPL have a total manpower of about 2,500 and account for revenues of Rs 300 crore.

It plans to scale up this number to Rs 1,800 crore over the next five years. The company is targetting this pretty ambitious target based on the fact that a considerable part of the group's debt is being restructured and this business will get the much needed working capital.

In addition to the manufacturing capabilities, this components business group will be backed by what BPL terms as a 150-strong R&D team in its four research centres.

This combined group is also looking to foray into modules for LCD TVs, set-top boxes, radio frequency applications for set-top boxes, antennas for GSM mobile phones, next generation compressors and speakers besides 21 inch flat picture tubes.

The company with this potential, targets to turn a global design, development and manufacturing house, while being the largest domestic supplier of components to the consumer electronics industry.

According to an industry analyst, this market is growing at 10-15 per cent per annum and the entries of MNCs has increased the demand for quality components, thus increasingly marginalising unorganised players and giving rise to more and more consolidation in this sector.