Friday, March 29, 2024

“Our Customers Come To Us For The Superior Technology Of Our Cameras And Their Quality”

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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.

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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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have medical device companies that are buying from Switzerland and Germany, so we ship all units maintaining the same quality. We have a very robust quality team in our company and in any EMS partner we work with. We make sure the quality is taken care of completely at all our facilities. Above everything, we are not here to sell our products at a low price. Our products are fighting on cost basis; we sell products that create value. We make sure we have enough margin to spend on quality and production so that this ecosystem is maintained well. We are not into a commodity field to sell just any kind of camera in huge numbers. For example, we do not sell cameras for webcams or CCTV cameras. Our customers come to us for the superior technology of our cameras and their quality. This is the ecosystem we have built step by step.

Q. What are the hiring trends in your company?

A. For the last few years, we have been trying to increase the bench strength. We always look for good people for R&D as well as in other areas like sales and production. Since we focus a lot on the R&D side, we are always looking for experienced engineers, as we are working with a very niche technology. It’s not easy to get experienced people in this field, so we hire a lot of freshers as well. We believe that, if we hire early, we can train them, so that they understand what we work on. So, we do a lot of hiring from colleges directly and then we make them go through rigorous training, where we explain what we have developed in-house, and get them up to date on cameras and imaging.

Q. Which engineering areas do you recruit from?

A. Most of our recruits are from the electronics and communication background. We want people who have a strong electronics background because we are making hardware products. Even if they are working on the software side, with embedded software, a good understanding of electronics is helpful. Recently, we hired from computer science engineering backgrounds as well. We train them in electronics basics which we require.

Q. In case there is a recession in the global markets this year, as expected, how do you expect it to affect your company?

A. Our company is not focused on one customer or one market domain. We have customers in the industrial and retail sectors. Our revenue is almost equally split up among all sectors. There will be some ups and downs. There’ll be some customers who’d buy more and some who’d buy less, but I believe that things will balance out eventually. The other thing is that recession affects a lot of things which are not very necessary. There’s a lot of need for many of the products that we are working on. It might slow down here and there, but things will go on. We’ve been running this company for 20 years. We have seen the recession in 2008 and the Covid crisis. We saw how companies were unable to react at all; they didn’t know whether to buy products. We had a complete shutdown of manufacturing. We managed that and we understand how things go on. We are going to be very watchful, but we are not expecting any big changes. We are a very small company and are not likely to be majorly affected by recession. We are likely to have some business even if there is a recession.

Q. What is your next milestone?

A. From financial perspective, we want to reach a revenue of $100 million. We are working hard to get there at the earliest. On the product side, we are making products for AMRs and autonomous shopping. We wish to be in a position where we are supplying these cameras to the top five or top ten customers or providers.


Maharajan Veerabahu Co-founder, e-con Systems

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