Three engineers got together in late 2003 to form a design services startup. Within five years e-con Systems started eyeing the manufacturing market and within ten years of its inception the startup entered the camera manufacturing industry. Today, the company has more than 300 products in its portfolio. Co-founder Maharajan Veerabahu shared his learnings with Yashasvini Razdan from Electronics For You. Read on to know how a design services startup transitioned into a product manufacturing company over the course of two decades.
Q. Can you please tell us about the journey of e-con Systems?
A. We founded e-con Systems in October 2003 as three passionate engineers who wanted to make electronics products. One of the co-founders was my college senior, the other was a friend he met at his first job. We started with embedded design services in the beginning. We started designing products for customers. We would do hardware design as well as software design, and the customers would take it forward and work on it. Initially, we were doing it for some Indian companies. Slowly we got some contacts in the US and gradually we started working with many US companies. In 2008, we figured that to continue with design services we had to either make it a big services company with thousands of people working, or else we needed to turn it into a hardware company, where we could generate more revenue and also realise our dream of making products in India. So, in 2008, we started focusing on cameras. At that time smartphones were becoming very popular, due to which cameras were also becoming popular. It was very tricky to integrate a camera into a product. It was not only the hardware part but there were also a lot of other things; lot of knowledge about imaging and development expertise was required to integrate cameras into products. So slowly we changed ourselves from a product design services company to an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) camera product company. In 2013, we were around 80 to 85% a services company and 15 to 20% products company—with that sort of revenue split. Today, we are 90% product company, and the rest are customisation services. In the services sector, we get involved with customers who use our cameras. We do services for them to integrate them into the product. So that’s the service part that we’re doing. Today, 75% of our customers are from the US, around 15% are from Europe—mainly Germany, Netherlands, and Austria region—and 10% are from South Korea and Japan. These are our key markets. We are now a hardware company that designs and manufactures products in India and ships them all over the world.
Q. As an Indian OEM manufacturer, who started as a startup and has remained in this field for so long, what is your secret?
A. We have been very focused on technology and understand what kind of technology sells in the market. To attract global customers from all over the world, we needed to have a unique technology that added value. We didn’t have a big sales team; we started marketing our products on the web. This is something we believed in, and it worked for us. The people who are looking for embedded camera technology know that we are among the top choices all over the world. So, they come and buy our camera samples that are available on our website. Our team provides complete support to the customers from here. That’s how our journey started. The uniqueness of our understanding of the customers’ needs and our technology make it easy for us to sell to our customers. We are subject matter experts when it comes to embedded vision. We have 250-300 unique applications that use our cameras across diverse fields such as agri tech, smart cities, healthcare, life sciences, retail, manufacturing, and robotics. This is our greatest strength.
Q. What were the challenges you encountered when you decided to transition from an electronics product design company to a manufacturing company?
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