Jupiter: the story continues...

With regard to the news report published in The DQ Week, issue dated April

6-12, “Is Jupiter Exiting IT Domain?” I would like to say that Jupiter has no

plans to exit the IT distribution business. In fact the company has ambitious

plans to make significant investment in manufacturing of IT peripherals in

India.

The company is making a tactical shift from being totally dependent on

imports to setting up manufacturing facilities in India. We are doing this in

order to control quality and achieve competitive edge in the market. Macro

economic changes in Taiwan and China have necessitated this and in order to fuel

the growth and achieve a quantum leap in business, we have decided to setup

manu-facturing facilities in Baddi, near Chandigarh.

The necessary approvals from the state and central government has been

received and the factory construction has been completed and we are targeting to

com-mence production by Jan 2010. The company plans to invest Rs 45 crore in

manufacturing activities within the next two years of which Rs 30 crore will be

invested by the end of 2009 itself.

I believe that in order to serve the maturing market in Indian it is now

important to be close to the customers and be able to respond quickly to their

changing needs and preferences and this is only possible if you have a state of

art manufac-turing facility in India. I have a personal passion for IT

distribution and I will only increase our commitment to this business. There is

no question of exiting from this business. Our plans, investments and sales

performances validate this and speak for themselves.

Alok Garodia



MD, Jupiter International

EDITOR REPLIES:



Some inputs on the lines of the above statement from Mr Alok Garodia were

considered and included while doing the story. However, there were strong

reasons because of which The DQ Week still carried the story. First, channel

partners across various cities were saying that Jupiter is losing interest in IT

business and their focus now was the sunrise solar power sector. Secondly,

Jupiter was not willing to share its market performance figures in IT business

to support their claim that IT was a focus for them.