MRO Tek sights foreign pastures

NEW DELHI: Bangalore based MRO Tek, one of the few Indian hardware success stories, is all set to expand its product portfolio with some new products in the Ethernet media converter range - ready to be launched within a period of three months. The company is also set to expand its facility base within Bangalore.

"We are about to launch some new media converter products in our FCAT series- in the month of February. This time we want to target the much coveted international market as well, SEA regional markets like Malaysia, Japan and Indonesia have a tremendous potential and we want to sell our products in these markets," said MRO Tek Ltd CMD, S Narayanan.

The company is also moving to a new 50,000 sq ft facility built at a cost of about Rs eight crore in Bangalore. "This is going to be our international headquarters in Bangalore. We will be moving into this facility within three months time," he added.

As it plans to go international with its set of products, the company is also planning to increase its manpower strength. Its present workforce strength of 140 professionals is likely to increase by five times within a period of three years.

"We will be increasing our workforce as we expand into other international geographies. We have recently created our marketing presence in the US about six months back and now we would be going to countries like Japan in Asia and UK in Europe," Narayanan explained.

Realizing the importance of core R&D, the company had invested close to Rs eight crore about two years back to perform R&D for the last mile access segment. "Some of our products are quite futuristic in nature. We have a product in the bandwidth management area and another in the billing area. Primarily all these products would be targeted towards big carriers, initially in the Indian sub-continent and after some time for the international market. The pricing for our FCAT series of products will start from Rs 8,000 in India," he added.

Recently, the company has provided its connectivity solution to Tata Power to be used for its Mumbai Metro Network. "Tata has taken about 600 sets of media converters and it is based on Linux platform so it makes it quite price competitive from other products. In addition to this, we have also bagged a Rs 15 crore order in association with Datacraft from SBI for networking of 800 branches," he informed.

Going forward the company is looking ahead for some OEM partnerships that would give it the right exposure into the international arena. "There have been a lot of inquiries about our products from different countries. Some Japanese and Korean ISPs are showing keen interest towards this," he explained.

"Our revenues for the year 2000-2001 were about Rs 125 crore. Because of the slowdown in the economy our revenues got affected and we were able to generate only Rs 96.53 crore for the year 2002-2003. However, on the exports side, last year we did exports of about Rs three crore. For the current year, we have already touched Rs 7.8 crore for exports, so we are moving in the right direction. We are on our way to cross the Rs 100 crore revenue mark easily for this year," he added.

As more and more companies continue to increase their focus towards ensuring better customer satisfaction, MRO Tek will be having a dedicated call center in Bangalore, to have more satisfied customers. Narayanan quipped, "more importantly as we venture into international markets, having a call center becomes very important".

The company will be starting its call center within the premises of its international head quarters in Bangalore with 20 seats. "Initially, there will be about 35 people in the customer service and we will scale it up as we move forward," he informed.

(CyberMedia News Service)