Rashi Peripherals Scoring High

The vision of Suresh Pansari in the early 1980s got culminated into Rashi Peripherals, a leading distributor of prominent brands like Altec Lansing, AMD, Asustek, Compex, HP, Lenovo, Logitech, Netgear, Prolink, Sandisk, Senao, Sony and XFX. And, the fruit it bore is its own accredited RPTech Branded System.

Today, Rashi has 45 branches across the country with more than 5,000 Resellers who are working together under various programmes like Authorized Rashi Partner (ARP), Rashi System Integrator (RSI), Rashi Retail Partner (RRP) and Genuine Logitech Dealer (GLD). They incorporate value addition by identifying the right Brand /Technology/ Product which is suitable for the Channel Partners. After identifying the right brand, they give pre-sales training/guidelines about the product and its applications and create awareness among various partners within the IT industry, all over India.

In regard to all these, they keep a track to update the knowledge of any change in the technology in the future. To unify and motivate the channel partners, they venture into plenty of incentive programmes. Regular Channel-friendly schemes, scheme benefits without any delay and Mauritius trip were a few among them. Rashi has a dedicated marketing team at the H.O. level on the basis of its distribution product range. It has its own warehouse at Vasai near Mumbai, which has been divided into sections on a product basis. At present, more than 400 professionals are employed in which 40 per cent are in Sales and Marketing, 20 per cent in after-sales support, 25 per cent in back offices and the rest is the support staff.

They intend expanding the team with the growth in the product portfolio. Geographically, addressing 150 cities of India directly, they focus on each and every brand/product distributed by them. With professional and profitable business approach, Rashi has taken very innovative marketing initiatives in the last few years to achieve this growth and penetration in the newer markets.

Rashi had a grand year, with the addition of new vendors in its case. Netgear was one of its acquisitions that marked Rashi’s entry into the network integration business. The thought was to penetrate into the market by completely providing solution with consultancy, pre- and post-sales support, especially in a mushrooming segment like networking.

A foremost show up was Rashi’s takeover of Mumbai-based distributor, Zeta Technologies. Since Zeta was a distributor for Altec Lansing and Rashi wanted to get into the audio speaker segment it simply took over. The takeover made Rashi the exclusive distributor for Altec Lansing.

Besides this, Rashi tied up with XFX for its graphics card range XFX 8800GTS, 320MB card in 8800-value segment.Latest in the run the 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card is HDTV-, SLI-, HDCP- and RoHS-ready, giving users world-class TV-out functionality and the ability to double their performance capabilities and significantly enhanced scalability on more than 60 of the top PC games. The card also features 320MB of unbelievable DDR3 power supporting digital output of up to 2560 X 1600 on not one—but two—displays.

Available in Standard, Extreme and XXX Version it is priced of Rs 32500/- and will be available in the first week of March 2007 at select Rashi Partners and 48 Rashi branches all over India. It carries 3 years warranty.

Commenting on this Mr. Kapal Pansari , Business Manager, Rashi Peripherals said, “This is the fourth 8800 Series card in a row from XFX after the launch of 8800GTX, 8800GTS (640MB) and 8800 XXX, and with this we aim to cater to the high demand for 8800 series card and encourage interested gaming enthusiasts to get theirs 8800 before the cards are sold out”

At a press conference, Mr Shigeru Iwata, Assistant General Manager, Sony Electronic (Singapore), said, “We are projecting a turnover of $20 million in the Indian market this year.Our tie up with Rashi Periherals is to further strengthen our relations with leading regional distributors and system integrators’’.

By introducing products in the storage segment of PCs, Sony would be competing with the likes of Samsung and Hewlett Packard in the Indian market.

Recently, Sony has appointed Rashi Peripherals for the distribution of high-performance optical storage devices. These include CD writers, CD/DVD ROM and floppy disc drives for PCs. In India, Rashi Peripherals is expected to help Sony expand its market for storage device products.

Rashi Peripherals has also been awarded as the “Fastest Growing Distributor”and for “Outstanding Contribution” in India by Netgear at the APEAC region distributors’ meet in Bangkok. Basking in the glory of this achievement, Suresh Pansari, Managing Director, Rashi Peripherals, said, “The year 2006 has been earmarked as ‘The Networking Year’ by Rashi Peripherals and we are focussed towards working along with Netgear to repeat the same success next year.”

If a man can make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Going by this adage, Rashi Peripherals has definitely proved their mantle in the world of IT and is scoring high among the competitors. This could be seen in the financial year 2004-2005 when Rashi clocked a turnover of Rs.217 crore and in FY 2005-06 Rashi is expected to gross in excess of Rs.370 crore.