What is Belkin’s business strategy?
Belkin’s business strategy is based on the simple fundamental of crawl, walk and run. You will find that every pillar of business is built on that. During the crawl stage, we take a look at all the existing products from the entire product range that Belkin has at present, out of which we choose 50 top products which present the best opportunity for the company.

After that comes the walk stage, during which we think of expanding our reach and adding more categories to our existing product categories. In the final phase which is the run stage, we make products for the people, keeping in mind the consumers we are catering to. Then comes the brand building stage, which involves empowering the ecosystem, investing on advertisements and creating a channel which is proactive and credible. Our product strategy also revolves around this same strategy. We have a specific goal of becoming a 100 million dollar business in another five years and I am very much sure that we will be achieving this target within the stipulated period.

At which stage is Belkin right now?
Belkin has achieved leadership position with a 16-per cent market share in wireless networking in India in just the second quarter after the start of its operations. Still, I would say that, at present, we are moving on to the walk stage. We wrote this stage keeping in mind a time lag of 36 months, before we finally step into the run stage. The run stage would see us making deeper infrastructure investments, setting up our own warehouses in India and hiring some third-party products for manufacturing some products for us locally, so as to ensure our distributors get the benefits within the country itself, instead of buying and importing products from the USA. Now that we have created history in the past one year and established our credibility, I am thinking of rewriting the strategy. There are many logical questions that come to the fore. Do we have the risk-taking ability to become a 100 million dollar business and even if we are taking the risk, do we have the patience? So taking all these things into consideration, we have to take a leap forward.

In the face of aggressive penetration of the Chinese products, how do you place your American brand in the market?
The foremost thing you need to do is to determine who your competitors are. If we look at the Wireless Networking market today, it stands at $15 million as per what the IDC report says, out of which four brands, namely Belkin, Linksys, Netgear and D-Link, contribute 85 per cent to it. All four are leading brands and performing really well compared to all the Chinese brands operational in the Indian market, despite the fact that a Belkin or a Linksys router comes for Rs.1,400, while a Chinese brand router will cost you a mere Rs.1,000. Also, you need to acknowledge the part played by the channel community in this regard as they are the one who take your products to the ultimate users. 

How many products do you have in the country? 
We have cut down our product suites in the country to 150 as against a figure of 2,000 all across the globe. 

What is your core competency? You sell both wireless networking products and accessories, so does that not pose any difficulties in product positioning?
In such a case, you have to cater to both the different clientele. Like, we make it a point to make products that surround our host device. The host device could be a computer, a laptop, a mobile phone, or a portable music player, iPod, MP3 music player. So, we surround these host devices while offering our products to our customers. Secondly, we need to work on four scenarios. Does the customer interact with the technology in a home environment, at work, in the car or while on the move? Based on these major assumptions, can we add products that make their experience of using their host device more comfortable, easier, more intuitive and more reliable.

Who are your top distributors?
We have five distributors, namely Cyberstar, Creative, Speed, SV Electronics and Caltron. Cyberstar covers North and Kerala markets, besides looking after the Belkin distribution in LFRs. Creative looks after the whole of West; SV Electronics takes care of Andhra Pradesh; and Caltron covers the Eastern market. Our overseas business in Bangladesh is handled by Speed Technologies, which is doing a good business for us in the country. We are also on the verge of expanding our business to Nepal and Sri Lanka in the near future.