Rohini Walia – Chief Revenue Officer, Thomson Audio

Dotted with constant innovation since its inception, European brand Thomson is celebrated for its outstanding designs, technology and performance. Bringing its legacy of over 120 years, Thomson Audio started its operations in India in 2019 when Envent Worldwide acquired its brand license to market and sell its products in the country. Currently recuperating from the upsetting impact of Covid-19 lockdown, Thomson Audio has now set his goal to fortify its position in the India market. Rohini Walia, Chief Revenue Officer, Thomson Audio, shares more about the brand and its strategy, in an interaction with Ramesh Kumar Raja. Excerpts:

The world has come to a standstill, and so are the electronics companies due to Covid-19 lockdown. How is the business so far for Thomson Audio in India? The widespread outbreak of Coronavirus has left businesses around the world counting costs. Sectors and industries in India as well are now grappling to sustain and counter the threatening impact of the pandemic on the overall economy.

Fear of the virus spread and the government’s lockdown is also having a devastating impact on all industries including the electronics sector. We had a bad start of the calendar year 2020 when China was locked down and we weren’t getting the shipments and when production got stabilized, the demand tanked in India.

Zero sale is hitting us the hardest

at the moment and that is leading to a lot of consequential issues in finance and marketing. We cannot do anything about it, but hope for this phase to pass soon without much damage and losses to anyone.

Companies are facing huge losses that may impact the inventories, budgets, finances for the entire first quarter and the next few months’ progress seems extremely bleak. What’s your plan ahead to deal with the crisis? With the catastrophic effect on our business, we are expecting the topline to take a hit by approximately 25% in the financial year 2020-21. Bottomline is even bigger worry since most of our expenses are as it is where the sale has gone to zero. We are still supposed to honor emis, pay salaries, pay rents of offices and warehouses but without creating any revenue for ourselves.

At this critical situation, it has become important to plan ahead of time and deal with the situation practically. From people to product line, we are working on all the available levers to fine tune our offerings and ensure we are better prepared once we come out of this bleak period. We also utilized this time frame to upgrade the skill set of our team members, so they can handle different responsibilities and do multi tasking.

What will be your priority to clear the stock and sell the new arrivals amid the patchy extended lockdown that could be there until the situation gets normal? Let’s count our blessings in these gloomy days. First of all, our products typically don’t come with an expiry date and that means, we

are under no such pressure to liquidate them. Secondly, unlike mobile phones where new models keep trickling down due to increase in storage or CPU speed or screen size etc, we don’t face those kinds of challenges and our product line stay stable over a shorter time span of 3-6 months. So, while this has thrown few plans out of gear, we are comparatively at a much better position than a lot of our friends in the Ce industry.

Online or offline - which medium yields maximum revenue for Thomson Audio? How will you fine-tune these two this time around? Majority of our business was coming from online e-com platforms, followed by B2B corporate sale. Offline retail was on the verge of opening and it was aligned to be open from 1st April but that got pushed by couple of months now. So considering the situation, we are trying to further strengthen our e-com offering and also coming out with our own e-commerce ready portal – www.thomsonaudio.in – so we can reach out to our consumers directly.

As a brand, how’s Thomson Audio positioned itself in a hyper-competitive market like India? Thomson is a european brand with over 120 years of heritage. The brand is recognized globally for advanced technology, its R&D efforts and innovation. It is celebrated for its outstanding designs as much as its technology and powerful performance. Bringing its legacy to India, Thomson Audio started its operations in India in 2019 when envent Worldwide acquired the brand license of Thomson Audio in India. In India our key audiences are youth in the age group of 15 to 35 and hence, we have launched our “Youth Machine” product range.

Well while I agree this market is extremely competitive, it has few advantages which gives even new brands to make its presence felt. First and foremost, this category is growing at breakneck speed of 40-50% YOY and that gives each brand to find out its niche and enter the market. Secondly, audio industry is not a dominant play for any specific brand. even the number one player don’t have more than 15% market share, so it’s easy to penetrate and find your space.

After sales service remains an issue for the majority of electronics companies. What is your approach to it? We believe that the after sales service has emerged as a key differentiating factor in generating our audience trust. We understand this clearly and hence there is a special focus on this. We have launched a unique “Doorstep Service” process where we pick the faulty units from your respective locations and will deliver the replacement there itself. You don’t need to look around or travel miles to find a service center and waste time convincing him of fault and issues. We handle it end-to-end for you from the comfort of your homes.

There is a parallel grey market in India thriving on counterfeit accessories and devices. How do you deal with them and what is your advice to the people to do away with those fake products? While this is a huge concern for higher ASP products in consumer electronics industry, it’s not too big a headache for us. Still to counter this, we insist our customers to register our products on our portal. This will not only assure them of genuity of the products, it also gets them a lot of additional benefits ranging from free gifts and additional months of warranty.

What are your outreach and investment plans for India? It’s just a beginning in India. There are miles to go before we can claim it a success. We have entered the market with very limited Skus & figuring out consumer response and ask. Our target audience in India is youth in the age group of 15 to 30 years. It’s very critical to understand their task, their choices and then fine tune the product range accordingly.

Beyond India, we are also targeting to expand to neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka, nepal, Bangladesh etc. and are looking for partners to sell there.

Please tell us something about R&D and innovation at Thomson? Any plan to expand your product portfolio? We have a R&D head in India who has a team based out of Hong Kong which works directly with our factory in China as well as with Thomson HQ in France. It’s a constant evolution process where we keep improvising to suit our consumer demand.

The emergence of IOT has opened a new avenue of growth for many tech firms. Do you have any plan to leverage this trend? Smart devices which are always connected via Alexa or Siri etc are another growth lever. Most of the audio devices have mic, so they will act as input source to a lot of other devices like TV, refrigerators or even air conditioners etc. We have already launched BT speakers which are Google Home-enabled and you can connect with smartphones and take instruction. We are developing a complete range of “Smart Products” over next few months.n