A smashing success

My Big Idea

Though he studied engineering, Ratish Ramanujam zoomed in on India's underdeveloped car service market after he finished his MBA.

He realised that people hardly give a second thought to all-important car parts like windshields and this led him to conduct extensive research on the subject; this eventually led to a tie up with a Japanese company to form Windshield Experts, with an investment of around Rs 2 crore, in 2000.

Within three years, the company has achieved a turnover of Rs 12 crore, and is aiming for Rs 50 crore by 2006. Now, rapid pan-India expansion is underway as Ramanujam seeks to transform the way people look at their windshields.

My family is from Kerala, where my father has an electricals business. I completed my engineering from Trivandrum Engineering College and came to Delhi soon after. I did my MBA at the International Management Institute (IMI) in the Capital.

Though no one in my family had ties with the automobile industry, I had always been interested in the automotive market.

What struck me in particular was that even as the Indian car market expanded at a furious rate, the service industry was not growing at a comparable pace. The problems ranged from spurious materials to inconvenience of location.

Within the broad spectrum of automobile components, I identified glass as a major area. It's a surprisingly low-involvement product when you think of it "" people fuss and fret about the quality of their car accessories and internal components but 95 per cent of them don't know what glass their windshields are made of.

This is surprising when you consider the danger potential of faulty glass "" not just in terms of its breaking but also in terms of distortion, which can cause visibility problems while driving.

Car owners are strangely complacent about their windshields too: they are prepared for contingencies like a battery running down but are caught off-guard when there's a crack in this fragile material.

Anyway, I began researching the subject and found a major gap in this market "" despite the fact that there are over 300 car glass breaks in Delhi per day and windshields provide 40 per cent of the structural strength of upper-segment cars.

In 2000, Windshield Experts was set up in collaboration with the Japanese Glass Company, PSC Tokyo Ltd and Allied Fincap Service, an Indian investment company.

The idea behind the company was to offer specialised service in repair and replacement of automotive glass.

Our first centre was set up in Safdarjung Enclave, Delhi in June 2000. We now have seven such centres in the National Capital Region and expansion plans are underway.

Within a month, four more centres will open "" in Mumbai, Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad "" and we are targeting a total of 25 by March 2004. That will make us a truly national company; we'll then be catering to around 70 per cent of India's car population.

We are very clear about our competitive advantages. For one, we have tied up with numerous insurance companies, like Tata AIG.

When a car glass breaks, the insurance company directs the customer to us for a cashless transaction repair; later, we take the payment from the insurance company directly.

This is convenient for the customer. We also offer a one-year warranty, and other services like mobile vans that operate from 7 am to 10 pm.

Our edge over authorised service centres is that we do a fast job; the glass replacement time for, say, a Maruti 800 is a mere 20 minutes at our workshops.

We also have a tie-up with Automotive Glazing, a European automotive company, and our technicians are trained to those standards.

Apart from just providing by-the-book service, we are conscious of the need to educate customers. We make it a point to give them information and tips on safety.

For instance, we recommend laminated glass, which is made of two layers and doesn't shatter on impact. Tough-end glass, on the other hand, is not as safe. Most customers don't know this.

What does the future hold? We're open to the idea of eventually getting into other automotive components but the priority is to strengthen our core business. For now, glass is the name of the game.