CXO of the week: JP Mishra, Country Manager – India, Newland AIDC

Newland AIDC was founded in 1999 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newland Digital Technology, with over 20 years of R&D in data capturing & enterprise mobility. Newland AIDC empowers your workforce in retail store floors, warehouse & distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, and other industries to transform your business with full data visibility and accuracy.

JP Mishra is a business leader with over 19 years of proven global experience in managing P&L, strategy, people, sales, operations, and building new businesses. He is passionate about understanding customers' business issues and helps find a way to solve them using technology solutions. With an entrepreneurial approach to business, he has built businesses from scratch, and crafted and executed strategies for breakthrough results. Highly focused, result oriented, self-motivated professional with rich experience, His key skills include sales, sales management, operations management, P&L management, customer acquisition, building trusted business relationships, business acumen, large deal structuring, coaching, managing diverse teams, etc.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with JP Mishra Country Manager India- Newland AIDC. He spoke about his business operations and what are the plans for the future and much more.

Introduction

Newland AIDC was founded in 1999 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newland Digital Technology, with over 20 years of R&D in data capturing & enterprise mobility, Newland AIDC has become one of the leading companies in the automatic identification and data capture industry. Newland AIDC empowers the workforce in retail store floors, warehouse & distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, and other industries to transform business with full data visibility and accuracy.

Newland AIDC’s existing & upcoming product portfolio comprises Barcode scanners (corded & cordless, Industrial Scanner, and Desktop Scanner), Enterprise Mobile Terminals, RFID solutions, and the next generation of Wearable devices.

Tell us a brief about Newland AIDC and its offerings.

Newland AIDC was founded in 1999 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newland Digital Technology, with over 20 years of R&D in data capturing & enterprise mobility, Newland AIDC has become one of the leading companies in the automatic identification and data capture industry. Newland AIDC empowers the workforce in retail store floors, warehouse & distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, and other industries to transform business with full data visibility and accuracy. Newland AIDC’s existing & upcoming product portfolio comprises Barcode scanners (corded & cordless, Industrial Scanner and Desktop Scanner), Enterprise Mobile Terminals, RFID solutions, next generation of Wearable devices, Fixed RFID, Vision Cameras & Desktop Barcode Label printer and Portable Bluetooth Label printer.

As Automatic Identification & Data Capturing (AIDC) Industry in India is currently in its early stages of development, how do you envision the future prospects and outlook for this industry?

It is expected that the market for the AIDC in India will experience a notable expansion in the foreseeable future. This growth can be attributed to various factors, such as an increased automation need, and greater adoption of innovative technologies. “AIDC Revolution” in India aims at automation in identifying objects, collecting data directly without any human involvement thus ensuring ‘ZERO ERROR’. The Indian market for AIDC Technologies has limitless potential and offers massive opportunities to manage inventory, delivery, assets, security, and documents in retail, e-commerce, manufacturing, healthcare, transport & logistics, and government.

What, as per you, are the five important things that AIDC should be looking at today?

The top important things for AIDC in India should be strengthening the Indian retail, Supply chain, Logistics& Manufacturing vertical.

The recent announcements by the Indian government on efforts to expand logistics, electronics manufacturing, and digital infrastructure in India are meant to reinforce the ‘Make in India’. Smart wearable devices were also introduced last year in the Indian market along with Barcode desktop printers & Fixed RFID.

The manufacturing vertical will be the focus for 2023, we have launched the Industrial Scanners portfolio, especially for electronics & auto manufacturing companies. We are planning to introduce an industrial automation portfolio to support basic track-and-trace applications for complex inspection, recognition, and guidance tasks. 

We will be adding Fixed Industrial Scanners, Ideal for high-volume industrial scanning environments with our stationary devices to follow items through production, storage, and fulfillment operations, delivering speed and accuracy. Smart Sensors & Machine vision Cameras for simple track-and-trace to complex quality inspection, our smart vision sensor and smart camera solutions will further offer real-time data and actionable insights on critical operations.

We are also in the initial stage of manufacturing a few local products in India this year under Govt/’s “Make in India” initiative.

In your opinion, which trends do you believe will lead to a significant disruption in the AIDC sector in India?

Presently, the rising need for supply chain management in numerous industries is catalysing the demand for identification and data capture technologies, such as barcodes, RFID tags, and QR codes to provide real-time tracking and tracing. This, in confluence with rapid digitization and the growing automation across industries, represents one of the key factors positively influencing the market across the globe. Apart from this, the introduction of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), in AIDC solutions to process, manage, store, and share data without human intervention and improve performance to provide more value to customers. Moreover, the increasing adoption of AIDC systems for data security in financial institutions is creating a favorable market outlook. In line with this, the burgeoning healthcare industry and the increasing utilization of AIDC for accurate capturing of data and enhanced operational efficiency are fuelling market growth. Furthermore, the government's focus on infrastructure projects is stimulating the growth of the market. Technology advancement, innovation in AIDC & its adoption by the enterprise will also play a key factor in creating a disruption in the Indian market.

Who are the competitors of Newland AIDC in India, and what strategies does Newland employ to establish dominance in the track & trace segment?

The key global participants present in the automatic identification and data capture market are Zebra Technologies, and Honeywell among the leading AIDC players & exist in the market for the past two decades,

Newland AIDC entered the Indian market in 2019 & grown at more than 200% CAGR. Newland AIDC is able to build trust & loyalty among partners & enterprise customers in just a few years, as its core strength & belief is delivering value to customers. Any organization is always concerned about its assets that should be maintained and managed properly to enjoy the expanded life cycle. In order to manage them accurately and effectively, you must keep them tracking regularly. Asset tracking is one of the most important tasks in managing an asset, but the concern is, how to keep tracking them all at the same time flawlessly is a hurdle.

Newland AIDC has a big portfolio of mobility products which along with scanning products helps end customers in a cost-effective way in comparison to competitors, with launching of new innovative technology products for the Indian market will also help our customers to enhance their productivity. Companies are now exploring the potential of AIDC products to track the items right from the manufacturing site to customers’ hands.

What are the primary factors driving growth in the AIDC segment?

The growing e-commerce industry, transportation & logistics increasing use of barcodes, QR code scanning, and image recognition, and rising adoption of automatic identification and data capture solutions due to their ability to minimize queuing and transaction time and provide greater convenience to users in making small-value payments are the major factors that are anticipated to boost the growth of the automatic identification and data capture market over the period. The rising adoption of automatic identification and data capture solutions owing to their ability to minimize human error is expected to fuel the growth of the automatic identification and data capture market

As AIDC entered the Indian market in early 2019, what challenges did it encounter due to the pandemic's arrival, and how did the company overcome them?

During the pandemic, the retail sector especially e-commerce & quick commerce along with the transportation and logistics sector saw a huge jump in consumer demand leading to pressure on the supply chain, Newland AIDC as a new entrant in the Indian market was able to help the customers, leading to the beginning of its growth story. There was a global Chip shortage issue along with supply chain crises, leading to material shortages & delays in delivery. The same was not applicable for Newland AIDC as we are one of the leading manufacturers of chips & were able to fulfill the material on time which strengthened our relationship with our customers & building their trust.

Also, we opened our own service support centers across 3 major metros in India which helped us to deliver quality service to our end customers in India, reducing customer operations downtimes. We were able to meet strict service & delivery TAT.