IEI Technology Corp, a leading industrial computing service provider, integrates computing platforms and offers customisation services. It supplies industrial computer boards, systems and peripherals for customer applications, and supports OEM/ODM services, thereby reducing its customers’ design time and accelerating product development. The company’s R&D team, effective management systems, quality assurance, and its range of over 400 products that are sold through more than 100 distributors, provide customers with fast time-to-market services all over the world. Teddy Kuo, CEO, IEI Technology Corp, spoke to Srabani Sen of Electronics Bazaar, about the current global trends in the embedded design market, and the market strategies the company plans to follow to capture the Indian market.
EB: What are the current global trends in the embedded design market?
Presently, the global market is growing at a faster rate for embedded products to keep up with the trends and demand. To keep up with this latest trends, IEI has also developed some new embedded products that are fanless, operate under a wide temperature range, and those that are multi I/Os x86 based, to give customers the opportunity to choose as per their requirements. Products in the embedded domain are undergoing technological changes to be more reliable, compatible, and to meet better performance standards.
EB: How do you view this market in India? What potential do you see in this domain?
Going by some important indicators over the last few years, the Indian market is booming. It is a perfect competitive market. Along with the development of infrastructure, the industrial automation and defence markets are growing in India. Over the last few years, there has been a significant growth in the Indian GDP. In the next five years, we foresee the Indian economy as becoming one of the fastest growing economies of the world, with a good population base. The projected GDP growth rate has been revised to around 8.75 per cent against 7.4 per cent in the previous year. The Indian economy offers the best investment opportunities even in tough times like the current recession.
We have a good market in India for embedded products. IEI products are concentrated in the industrial automation, security and surveillance, digital signage, automobile, energy and power, military and aerospace, transportation, telecom and networking domains. Out of all these markets, industrial automation seems to have good potential and we get a good response from this sector, too.
EB: Which of your products are most popular in India?
Many IEI products are popular in India, particularly industrial grade embedded PCs, industrial PCs, single board computers/motherboards, industrial panel PCs, rugged panel PCs, industrial workstations, network communication products, and digital signage products.
IEI offers very unique products in terms of design and software tools, and at the same time is very cost effective. We offer products that are reliable and we do value addition to our software tools at no additional costs, which makes IEI very attractive to Indian customers.
EB: What market strategies are you adopting to capture the Indian market?
IEI’s new winning strategies include a dedicated Indian sales team to cater to the Indian market, joint ventures with dealers, regular advertisements in the magazines, road shows, events, exhibitions, e-news, Web advertisements, etc.
EB: Are you open to partnering with Indian companies?
Indeed, we are open to this in the east Indian region and in Punjab, Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh as we don’t have strong distributors in these areas. We have strong distributors in south, west and central India. We are also considering partnerships with private companies that have the ability to increase IEI’s penetration in Indian markets.
EB: What kind of challenges have you faced while doing business in India?
Well, so far, we have faced a lot of competition in this growing market, but IEI is developing very unique products to compete in the embedded market.
EB: How important is the Indian market for you?
Looking at the Indian market for industrial computing, we find the potential in India is high in the field of defence. The Indian defence industry is the biggest market for us, in terms of the import of defence equipment as well. The Indian government desires to procure 70 per cent of its defence needs from within India and also increase private partnership.
Estimations show that the current defence market for private sector companies in India is huge and we see a huge opportunity there. The growing defence equipment and industrial automation sectors are expected to create new opportunities for us.
