• leadership

Born in a small town called Bhagra in the Rajasthan-Haryana border, Narendra Bansal was a typical small town kid. Son of a grain merchant, Bansal’s early education was in Nepal. Moving back to India in 1980, Bansal was fluent in Nepali and struggled in Hindi through his higher secondary studies. Eventually passing out with a B.Com degree from Delhi University in 1985, Bansal wasn’t keen to join his family business.
Always enthralled by technology, for a few years Bansal tried his hand at trading in magnetic audio tapes out of Palika Bazaar in Delhi. “In 1993, I observed the enormous opportunity provided by the IT hardware sector. During that time, Taiwan used to be what China is today. During the end of 1995, I had traveled to Taiwan. An MNC headquartered at Singapore, manufacturing Ethernet cards in Taiwan, piqued my interest. The product was priced at an exorbitant rate in India,” says Bansal.

Early days
After conversations with various vendors Bansal managed to arrange a shipment of about a thousand pieces of the same. Back home, the problem was with selling the product. No one was willing to buy the cards and the market was not interested in buying an unknown brand.
Intex, as a brand, was at its very first stage and it proved to be a testing phase for Bansal. “If selling was tough I naively put a condition that we would accept payment only by checks. Most products were sold without a bill those days since taxes were very high. I, however, stuck to it as my selling point was the price advantage the products offered and the after-sales service. The price at which we chose to sell was about 50 percent lesser than what the multinational company was selling at. We rose to success mainly because of the after-sales service we gave our customers. They could return the product to us and get it replaced if it did not suit their needs and if the product was not favorable. We also added a lifetime warranty with the products, which was an added benefit,” says Bansal. When Intex moved into the market as a brand, it launched products from the perspective of a customer. Existing multinational companies in the market did not quite believe in Intex during the initial days. But as the company grew bigger and sustained as a brand in the market, they saw its worth. “We increased our products, service base, team and tried to make our presence felt in most parts of the country. It used to be a sellers’ market earlier, now it has transformed into a buyers’ market. Today, a consumer has many options to choose from in any product category. As a brand and supplier, one has to be aware of new product launches in the market,” says Bansal.

Intex has changed over the years, keeping pace with the change in the market. When Intex was born, Nehru Place in Delhi was the main purchasing hub. Customers across the nation flocked there for IT/electronic products. Today, each company has to go to the customers to sell products.

Changes and adjustments
While the brand did well, the company turnover managed to reach a modest Rs.32 crore by 2002. Bansal roped in Ramesh Vaswani, someone who had back then acquired a status of turning around companies. Enormous data was generated within the company but not used at the time when Vaswani joined the company. The mandate initially was to restructure: to convert data into daily reports, weekly and monthly reports, formalize a monthly reporting system of calculating the monthly profit and loss, a monthly balancesheet, and start interacting with the branches on their daily stocks, sales and collection. “The ERP system helped in collecting daily data because payments were collected from all distributors. This way, we had a daily collection target at hand, could monitor inventory, sales, stocks and collections daily across India,” recalls Vaswani.

The company also brought in professionals to run the accounts department. The finance and accounts department got streamlined. The logistics department was not spared; it was streamlined to take control of slow and non moving stocks with a monthly review. The purchase system got a boost in the form of forecast systems based on past sales and trends of the past months. For product planning, a technical department was introduced.

The technical department started laying down the prices of each product and identifying those that needed to be launched. A product development team was set up and both these teams starting visiting international fairs, got into an active dialogue with major manufacturers in China to find suitable products. They collected samples of new models and products. Every item was then physically received, evaluated in the lab/on field. “We altered the products to suit Indian conditions,” says Vaswani.

‘Made in India’
In 2003, the company began discussing internally the need for manufacturing. “We began with multimedia speakers. This is Intex’s vital product in terms of its range, price and performance,” says Vaswani. Intex’s manufacturing domain comprises three manufacturing units belonging to the Group located at Jammu and Manpura (Baddi, HP). The units have been producing desktops, multimedia speakers and PCBs and had also produced UPS, home UPS, notebooks and DVD players in the past. The company intends to vertically integrate backwards into the manufacturing of many more products and also bring in foreign technology from global leaders.

“We would eventually want to expand our production portfolio into mobile phones, components for cell phones like battery, UPS, DVD players etc,” says Vaswani.

Sales strategy
Much of the company’s growth can be directly attributed to its sales strategy. “One should be available within reach of customers when the need arises. Every village, town and city in the country has to be mapped and the company has to reach there when the products are required. The after sales service is also important. The customer would want instant service, the best product with the latest features at the best offer price,” says Bansal.

What clicked?
Intex has been successful because it is customer-oriented. “The first biggest customer for my Ethernet card which I had brought in from Taiwan wanted 16 pieces of it. I had got this customer through classifieds. When he met me, he was surprised to see that I worked at a basement with no staff and with no brand/technology business associated with me. I gave him the assurance that if he did not like the product, he could return it. Because of the price gap, he accepted quickly. On a Sunday morning in Delhi, he called to complain the product wasn’t working. My brother and I went across and spent the day trying to fix the problem. There was a compatibility issue and the card finally did not work. The next day, I accepted the product back and paid him back the money,” says Bansal.

After a few years, the same 16 pieces turned into orders for 20,000 to 30,000 pieces per month and the first customer went on to become a friend of Bansal. Intex today runs the largest number of service centers amongst IT hardware vendors. Even before opening a branch of the brand the company opened a service center.

Bansal started the company with Rs.5,000-Rs.10,000 from his savings. “I tried getting deals with vendors and began building relationships based on trust and honesty,” says Bansal. Till date, he has never had any investor; his expansion is backed by internal accruals and debt from banks.

“Intex, as an organization, does not have any boundaries. Each business is handled by a specialized team. As a brand, we want to be globally respected,” says Bansal. The company’s foray into anti-virus segment is a tie-up with Symantec, one of the largest software companies in the world.

Forging ahead
In its most important vertical, computer peripherals, Intex has reached a turnover level of almost Rs.300 crore to Rs.350 crore and as the government continues to push initiatives to make computers reach rural India, the company expects growth to be at 40-50 percent CAGR. In the mobile space, where it is a new entrant, Intex’s share of the Indian handset market is 1.5 percent and its share in the low-cost handset segment is close to three percent. Intex Technologies has entered Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and will enter Africa after clocking sales of 1.5 lakh phones a year in India.

Often described by his employees as data hungry, Bansal is extremely hands-on with the company. As CEO, he has to keep up with daily operations and as MD and Chairman, his duties vary from attending board meetings to talking to technicians. Backed by a professionally-run team, Bansal says he will soon enter the capital markets with an IPO.
With a headcount of 2,500 across India, Bansal says Intex aims to reach a turnover Rs.1,000 crore this fiscal from the Rs.733 crore clocked last financial year. The hardware and mobile phone segments are expected to contribute to growth even as the company enters the low-cost housing segment.

©Entrepreneur August 2011

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Bhagra, companies, computer, customer, Delhi, Intex, Narendra Bansal, vendors