A hardware edge

Amkette is staying ahead by moving into high-end computer peripherals

Rajiv Bapna has an ambitious goal. He's trying to persuade computers users to throw away their old-style keyboards and start using his ergonomically friendly A-style board.

"The 'A' type layout reduces stress on the key wrist and knuckle joints, which come under enormous stress during typing," says Bapna, managing director, Amkette (the company is formally known as Allied Electronics and Magnetics).

That's not the only change that Bapna is trying to introduce to Indian hardware users. He's about to introduce a new range of products including PC monitors with LCD screens.

Also, it will soon aggressively start marketing the wireless options for the mouse and keyboards. Says Bapna: "The real growth in IT hardware will happen once, we take the hardware into the digital home."

It's not bad going for a company that started out as a maker of floppy diskettes and other secondary storage devices. But Amkette's strength has always been that it moved with the times and made innovative moves when needed.

Now it is making a big move into the domain of high-end computer peripherals market. The new products include a noiseless wheel mouse, and a Internet wireless 3D mouse and the ergonomically designed wireless keyboard.

In a few months time, Amkette's Udaipur factory will start making the LCD monitors. Meanwhile, the company is looking at an entirely new line "" it's selling cheaper and eco-friendly e-cartridges for printers.

That's probably a smart move because costly printer ink is a great grouse amongst computer users. Amkette is offering two options. Its e-cartridges are priced 30 per cent to 40 per cent cheaper than the standard offerings from the big companies.

Then the company is offering the e-fill where users can simply 'fill' the cartridges with ink, which comes for around Rs 150. That's compared to about Rs 1,500 for a cartridge from HP or Canon. "Spend five minutes and save 90 per cent was our message to consumers," says Bapna,

And this has been the underlying vision of Amkette in all these years ""innovation. Bapna, a former engineer from BITS Pilani and IIT Delhi, went to the Middle East, to work for Citigroup, before he teamed up with three friends, in 1985, to set up Amkette.

"We were very clear from the beginning that the business model would be to work on carefully identified niches," says Bapna.

Soon afterwards Amkette, set up its first manufacturing plant in Udaipur, just when India was waking up to the Infotech wave, with an investment of around Rs 5 crore. The company broke even in the second year itself.

The plant started manufacturing everything in IT hardware. In 1985, it launched 8" floppies under the brand name Amkette, which rapidly gained nationwide acceptability.

Amkette continued to innovate with 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies. As floppies started to lose favour towards the end of the nineties, Amkette moved swiftly into optical media storage solutions.

"The optical media group continues to be our key focus area," Bapna says, "where Amkette, controls 10 per cent of the top-end segment with its Durashield recordable CDs."

This apart it makes rewritable CDs and is now selling recordable DVDs in the market. "We must constantly learn, as old technologies become redundant and I'm sure floppies will die a natural death in another three years," he adds.

Ther floppy market has stagnated, although regional and small towns generate enough demand for Amkette, but the future is in alternate innovation.

Amkette is expected to grow by an extremely healthy 40 per cent this year. Bapna, however, believes this is the right time to take niche products to everyman. He has particularly high hopes for the ergonomically standardised keyboards.

Even though Amkette is a relatively small company it has had its influence on the industry. When it started manufacturing floppies in India, a common complaint was fungus formation on diskettes.

After working on the problem for six months Amkette developed a film that could resist fungus which boosted its sales hugely. That, in fact, was the innovation which helped it to carve out a niche in the market.

"But first, we must explore new niches," says Bapna, " because that is where the real excitement is "" in discovering newer products and newer ways of doing things, than just getting into assembly line large-scale manufacturing."

The high-end market for peripherals is pegged at Rs 75 crore, and Bapna hopes to garner around Rs 17 crore of that in the first year, with the help of his 5,000 retailer and 500 distributor, presence across 35 cities.

Once the products are successful in India, Bapna, has his eyes set abroad, but that is still a long way off.

The company has also devised its own marketing strategies to ensure that it hangs on to customers. It is, for example, using loyalty programmes extensively.

"The Enjoy Amkette programme, launched some five months ago, is the first ever loyalty programme in IT verticals," claims Bapna. Under this programme, when a user buys a product online, he gets 'purchase points' that he can redeem online.

So where is India's oldest hardware peripherals brand headed in the years ahead? "On the road to more exciting innovation," beams Bapna, "and making such options affordable for the Indian consumer."