'We Are Broad Basing Our Revenues'

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[<p>R<strong>ajiv Mody</strong>, chairman and managing director, Sasken Communication spoke to Businessworld's <strong>Venkatesh Babu</strong> about how he is fixing the company. <br><br><strong>Excerpts:</strong><br><br><strong>While your profitability has grown, your revenues have shrunk by a fifth in the last two years. What has gone wrong over the last couple of years?</strong><br>Over the past 3-4 years what have changed significantly are two things. The first is network equipment companies like Nortel, Alcatel, Lucent etc. we used to pride in having great relationships with and the deep technical knowhow have undergone a lot of pain because of changing market conditions. Some of them have gone bust and others have faced challenges. They passed on the pain to us and there is no escaping that.<br><br>On the devices (handsets and semiconductor companies) side, players who were market leaders have fallen, all the software standards have gone away. Symbian has faltered. All this happened within a short period of time. Texas Instruments for instance decided to exit the wireless modem business in which we were majorly associated with them. Pace of change has accelerated dramatically. It takes time to build know-how in the newer areas. What we did not see coming was the advent of applications and cloud in a big way. We were linked with some of our customers so strongly we did not see this coming. Reminds of an HBR paper which said how a company could fail by listening to customers too much also. It is not too late to fix that. Also we should have limited our dependence on certain limited verticals. That is the transition path we are on.<br><br><strong>How are you fixing these shortcomings?</strong><br>We are broad basing our revenues, getting into newer segments like automotive, consumer electronics, retail and other areas. We are providing solutions for Smart TV and energy management for telecom networks. We are betting big on Android and its ecosystem. We are closely working with major handset vendors in this space. We have had significant success on this front. From being just a component player we have moved to becoming an end to end system integrator. We will start seeing material impact of all this stuff during the tail end of the current financial year and only accelerate going forward. We will be back to our growth ways.<br><br>(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 10-10-2011)</p>