"With new opportunities knocking at our door, we are well equipped to take a leap by adding products, solutions and services in line with the industry growth"

In a chat with VARINDIA, VIBHOR AGARWAL, Marketing Director, Supertron Electronics discusses the business model, the YOY growth, customer trends and their preferred brands, opportunities in SMB business etc.

Please give us a little brief about yourself and the company.

I am an Engineering Graduate with an MBA and approximately 3 decades of experience in the IT & Services Industry. I have been associated with Supertron for almost 17 years now and am managing the overall sales and distribution of the organization under the capacity of Director Sales & Marketing.

Supertron Electronics has a distribution expertise of over 28 years in India. We distribute IT Hardware and Solutions & Services to our customers. With 36 branch offices, 19 Satellite branches and a reach of more than 750 cities across India, we currently service over 10000+ partners. Our overall revenue is around USD 620+ Million and we are aligned with over 30+ brands that have distribution rights within India.

Our ethical business practices and hunger for more business has enabled us to become a preferred distribution partner for all the brands we currently partnered with. We focus on both the consumer and commercial segments:

In the commercial space, we are into enterprise solutions in security, storage, data centre, cloud, AV Integration, networking and security surveillance etc. We also indulge in B2B volume business with the government, corporate and enterprise customers.

Briefly explain your business model and what drives your YOY growth. Why would your customers select you over your competitors?

We work as closely as an extended arm with our vendors to ensure that we add value to our relationship and eventually to business. In recent times, the segments that have been seeing a high demand are, PC, servers, storage, networking, gaming, solutions around work from home/learn from home, security, AI and Machine Learning. With new opportunities knocking at our door, we are well equipped to take a leap by adding products, solutions and services in line with the industry growth. We aim to expand our reach and our services to partner all across India with the help of digital innovation. All our policies revolve around customer satisfaction, which is key to getting preferred over the competition.

What is the most preferred brand/product by your customer and do they opt for any additional services? Have you seen any customer trends in the last few months?

The most preferred brand by our customers is Lenovo because of how stable their products are, along with being rich in features and backed with Lenovo Service Support. During the pandemic period we saw a drastic increase in demand for laptops for WFH scenarios. The reason we were able to successfully fulfill our customer demands was only due to the exclusive support we received from the Lenovo team. With companies shifting to a remote working environment, clients were looking for more service offerings along with the laptop. Lenovo services portfolio was perfect for our clients. Services like Lenovo Premier Support and Onsite Installation along with extended warranty support were the game changer in these times. We also saw an increase in demand for multiple allied solutions with Lenovo Think Servers, ThinkPad, ThinkCentre & ThinkStation products.

How have you supported customers to ensure that the IT workforce runs smoothly during the pandemic and how will that change now that offices are reopening?

During the time of the pandemic we faced a huge challenge with stock movements due to the country wide lockdown. Since there was a pile up of demand in the consumer and corporate segments due to the recent Work From Home / Learn From Home situation, we continued to service our channel fraternity by taking special approvals and filling their IT demands.

We also provided Lenovo Device Intelligence (LDI) Solutions to some customers. This solution benefited their IT Administration teams to be proactive in their ability to support their end-users and monitor device trends as well as forecast hardware or software issues in advance.

What opportunities can you foresee for the SMB business? Do you think it will be product driven or would a combined offering with various services provide opportunity for business expansion?

The digitisation of Indian SMB and MSME sectors has been a top priority for the government for decades. There is a lack of awareness among the sector regarding the value creation of digitalisation to their business, which has hindered the adoption of digital tools and products.

With the outbreak of Covid-19 in India and the rise in social distancing measures, the need for an online presence has become important. Additionally, the adoption of digital tools such as remote workplace management systems, digital payments and enterprise tech applications have also gained priority This has forced SMBs in India to quickly move past the long-standing reluctance towards digitisation and open newer opportunities.

Customers today prefer a one stop solution for everything. Product, solution and services integration is going to be the next generation offering and customers will have a better experience with integrated solutions for their technology needs.

How was your digital transformation journey and how has it aided your employees and customers?

Customer experience is an important aspect of digital transformation. We are determined to give out partners an experience which would help them get all the information about their business at their fingertips. We are working with our partners to empower them and enable them to monitor their business with us. We are also working on ways to implement digital transformation which eventually help our partner to keep updated with flow of information, new products and technology.