ICE PEOPLE: Ratul Puri

Digital storage bull

, the 32-year-old executive director of Moser Baer, is a self-confessed workaholic and claims he has no other hobbies to write home about.

In the last two years, he has taken to shooting pictures with his digital camera. "But that's basically family pictures, mostly of my three young kids aged between 8 months and 7 years," says Puri, a computer engineer from Carnegie Mellon University.

The precious growing-up years have been archieved in several DVDs and CDRs.

But the idea to safely store the pictures struck only when a virus hit his computer's hard disk where he'd been filing them.

And the change in his own habit as a consumer of optical media storage convinced him that the market for products such as DVDRs and CDRs is growing in India and abroad.

"There is so much digital content available via the Net, digital cameras, camcorders etc that people do want to store it," says Puri. The global market for DVDRs is poised to grow 100 per cent, he claims.

And that's a good reason for Puri (his family holds about 20 per cent equity in Moser Baer, which is a listed company) to sink in another Rs 600 crore in expanding the manufacturing capacity for DVDRs and CDRs.

"It's brownfield expansion," he says. Currently, Moser Baer produces nearly 2.2 billion multi-format storage disks in a year, mostly for the overseas market.

Of its Rs 1,600 crore revenue, Rs 1400 crore accrues from exports.

Other than capacity expansion, Puri is also overseeing the R&D for two new storage formats: the Blu-Ray and the High Density (HD) DVD formats to be launched in 2006.

The company has been carrying out its own R&D in line with what the global fora on the new technology demands.

Though Sony has taken the lead in launching the Blu-Ray format, its offerings are considered to be unaffordable and bulky.

Also, the company is eyeing the pre-recorded media business. Of course, the blank storage media will continue to be its core business, but the pre-recorded market is becoming attractive with the growth in the entertainment industry.

"Though we already do some pre-recorded media for our global clients, we're ready to explore this market further," he adds.