Techmezine speaks with Shiv Bhambri, Country Manager, RS India on RS’s journey in India.
1. Kindly share about RS Indian market journey. The key achievements, and focus of the company so far?
RS India is part of RS Group, a leading global omni-channel industrial product and service solutions provider to customers who are involved in designing, building and maintaining industrial equipment and operations, safely and sustainably. With operations in 32 countries, the company offers more than 700,000 industrial and electronic products, sourced from over 2,500 leading suppliers, and provides a wide range of products solutions to over 1.2 million customers. RS trades through multiple channels and ships over 60,000 parcels a day.
RS India has been supporting customers in India for over 28 years and has established itself as a strong player in the B2B space. Our USP of No minimum order value or order quantity has made us a preferred partner especially in the R&D, Prototyping, Maintenance & Academia domain. With free doorstep delivery within 4-5 business days, we’ve been servicing customer needs and adding value.
We help our customers throughout the product life cycle including innovation and technical support during the design phase, improving time to market and productivity during the build phase, and cost-savings and inventory optimization during the maintenance phase. We provide our customers with customised product and service propositions that are necessary for the smooth running of their operations and enable them to save time and money.
2. Can you please share an overview of DesignSpark?
DesignSpark is a RS initiative- an online design community and resource centre for makers, students and design engineers. Launched in 2010, DesignSpark is an online gateway that gives engineers trusted and reliable information and resources, bringing together design information, user generated reviews and new free-of-charge tools to speed up the design process.
Starting with the design phase, RS provides products and solutions that span all stages of the industrial lifecycle. Our DesignSpark platform is a hub of design and innovation for sustainable engineering solutions.
The platform brings together a community of 1.3 million engineers, professionals and students from 32 countries to learn, develop and design sustainable technologies that improve peoples’ lives.
3. What’s your take on the looming global chip crisis?
The issue of lack of supplies is still being dealt with. Supply shortages have not been fully resolved. There are many areas of semiconductor supply that continue to be constrained, high power discrete and analog products including sensors in addition to many microcontroller products all continue to be under capacity constraint and restricted supply which will go well into 2023. Nevertheless, many sectors of the supply chain for passive components have returned to normal, and although interconnect and electromechanical items still have some lengthy lead-times, there has been a clear trend towards shorter lead-times. I predict that the lead-time trend will continue to decline.
The pressure to maximise supply availability for our customers remains high, which necessitates negotiating the numerous supply chain and lead-time problems that still exist. Due to the intricacy of demand changes and the fact that not all supply chain issues can be resolved, supply will not normalise across all items quickly.
4.What is your roadmap for India for the financial year 2022–23?
We have seen a healthy double-digit CAGR over the last 5 years (pre-covid), which doubled in financial year 2021-22. This 50% growth indicates that the market has realized and is favouring the real value of the RS business model & RS has moved from an emergency supplier to a preferred supplier to all its customer across the country.
Below are a few key pointers for RS India’s growth this year:
- Sustaining the 50%+ growth momentum in FY23
- Continued focus on key industries like Medical Electronics, Railways, Automotive etc. where we’ve made major in-roads
- Extend our advanced procurement solutions (eProc, VMI, TCO etc.) to global customers in India
- Aggressive customer acquisition in untapped territories across Tier 1 & 2 cities
5. How has the pandemic affected your business & sales?
RS India with its AOE-T1 status had special import permissions during lockdown which enabled us to support essential industries, medical electronics, pharma among others. As mentioned already, RS India doubled its growth in FY 2021-22 indicating a surge in growth as seen over the last 2 years primarily due to the shift in customer’s perception of RS from an emergency supplier to a strong preferred supplier across industries.
6. According to you, the vital role of semiconductors with the augmentation of 5G technology?
Semiconductors are central to 5G technology with many different types of applications. As is the case with most major technology developments, semiconductors are at the heart of almost all.