Artek set to double its market share

Artek Enterprises, the Delhi based networking company plans to double its market share in the current financial year. It hopes to achieve the target of 2.2 percent of the Rs 1,234 crore networking market in India, thus achieving a targeted turnover of Rs 35 crore. This will be a significant jump from the 1.78 percent market share that the company was enjoying last fiscal.

The growth that Artek is visualizing is in accordance with the growing networking market in the country. "The networking market which has grown over 35 percent as per the DQ Top 20, would be growing by 60 percent this year," said Anil Gupta, Director, Artek. He is optimistic of being amongst the top 50 networking companies, if there were such a categorization.

Artek, which has been a major distributor of products of D-Link, Mro-tek, Cisco and Hyderabad-based Cygnus, has been into the area of system integration since the last four to five years. With products ranging from the sphere of LAN, WAN and structured cabling, the company has developed an expertise in network design and system integration.

"We aim to become a single vendor as far as networking is concerned. So, right from visualizing to design to the actual cabling, we provide the services to the customer," elaborated Gupta. According to him, system integration is a vibrant and emerging market, whereas networking market is growing by leaps and bounds.

Artek has grown steadily in the networking market by bagging mainly the turnkey projects from the PSUs. It has the installations in PMO, Parliament House, NIC, Election Commission and Ministry of Finance to its credit. The company has done the complete LAN installation in PMO as well as Rashtrapati Bhavan. It has also bagged an order from the Ministry of Defense worth Rs 4 crore for the intranet installation.

The networking for ticketing that was done for the Railways, in association with its principal Cygnus is so far the most satisfactory and lucrative work done by Artek. "The ISPs and their cabling is also a potential market for us," explained Gupta.

It has tied up with Satyam Computers for the cabling of their ISPs. In addition to this, Artek has the order of doing the UTP-LAN cabling in IIT Kanpur, which will bring a revenue of Rs 90

lakh.

The cabling involves both copper as well as fiber cabling. The fiber, even though has the advantage of covering large distances, is about three to four times expensive, explained Gupta.

Gupta attributes the reason behind the success to the technical expertise that the company has acquired over the years.

Besides, being a small player among the giants, Artek has the advantage of enjoying the trust of its customers. The company follows a policy of not going into major projects and refrains from anything bigger than Rs 50

lakh.

Artek is now looking into outsourcing its services by taking up the system integration of the resellers and PC vendors, where the bigger networking companies do not venture. Thus the company can expand its reach to the reseller market too.

"The concept of convergence of voice and data has also opened up another vista for the cabling and networking market," said Gupta. He added that more and more corporates are recognizing the importance of intranets and that would be beneficial to the networking market. "Artek tends to emphasize more on its services and in providing better products and on site installations, which brings in more customers."