WeP aims at 20% exports

WeP Peripherals Ltd, a provider of computer and internet peripherals, has drawn up plans to take its export revenue from the present six per cent to 20 per cent by 2008. Towards this growth plan, WeP has opened an office in Dubai to exclusively cater to West Asia, Africa and SAARC countries by tapping the export market.

The new set up was opened in October 2005. WeP has manufacturing facilities at Mysore, Hyderabad and Himachal Pradesh with its operational headquarters at Mysore.

WeP is presently exporting to Europe, China, SAARC and Japan and has crossed over Rs 50 crore in export business. "Four years of experience in international market has given us the confidence of achieving this target. Our export market is growing tremendously," says the company's general manager (operations and OEM exports) S Nagarjuna.

Having already expanded its printer head manufacturing capacity, WeP Peripherals, which manufactures a variety of printers in impact range, is exporting 50 per cent of its print heads to China.

Its printers are certified by the Chinese government apart from certification given by CE, the highest standard of European certification.

Nagarjuna told Business Standard that the company started exporting to China last year and did a business of Rs 4-5 crore in the very first year.

WeP printers support ten Indian languages, including Kannada and Tamil. The Tamil99 standard has been developed by the Tamil Nadu government to standardise the use of Tamil language in the software and printing industry. They come in two coding schemes Tamil monolingual and Tamil bilingual.

WeP's language printing solutions come in dot matrix printers (DMP), line matrix printers and hi-speed printers. Its DMPs understand only ASCII (American standard code for information interchange).

The Indian language standard is in ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange). ISCII enables the printer to print in Indian languages at six times the speed of a normal printer.

Its multilingual language DMPs come in all European languages, apart from Chinese and Thai. "Chinese language characters were a big challenge. It meant a lot of design change in the hardware. We did it successfully," he said.

Nagarjuna sees a huge opportunity in hardware manufacturing in India due to multiple reasons.

"The domestic market is fast growing with increasing computerisation and software exports. Western world is seriously looking at second option to China, and India is the most fitting one for this option with its engineering skills and a large domestic market. More advantages are coming towards India", he said.

Therefore, we see a huge domestic opportunity for hardware manufacturing in India. This is the best time to invest and take advantage of it," says Nagarjuna.