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‘Affordable’ Apple, Really?

German brand Blaupunkt is a name to reckon with in audio segment in India. From personal audio and Bluetooth speakers to sound bars and accessories, Blaupunkt Audio has earned rave reviews from different quarters, in a very short span of time since its inception in

India. The company is going through a very tough time, like any other player, in wake of coronavirus outbreak. Sukhesh Madaan, CEO, Blaupunkt Audio India, speaks more about the brand, its offerings, and the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on its business, in a conversation with Ramesh Kumar Raja. Excerpts:

How Blaupunkt Audio is positioned itself in a hyper-competitive market like India? While the market is hyper competitive, it’s extremely huge and growing at 50%+ rate year-on-year. When the growth of any vertical is so much, it provides ample opportunities for every sincere player to play its part. also, the market is extremely fragmented across different price points and there is a clear gap for a great quality international brand which is priced

correctly.

How do you ensure the quality of your products besides maintaining a dominant position in the audio domain? Blaupunkt actually means “Blue Dot” which was actually the sign of quality and we are carrying on with the same values. One thing which is uncompromised and unacceptable globally in Blaupunkt is “Quality”. While sound and product quality was always Blaupunkt strengths, we further

worked on packaging and high bass sound to suit it to indian market requirements. When you sell online, the packaging quality requirements are much more stringent compared to global standards.

How are Blaupunkt products gaining traction in the market? How has been their response so far, online as well as offline? Blaupunkt was launched in india in Home audio & Bluetooth speaker category in online space first in 2017 and then the portfolio of personal audio was added in 2019. While online still contributes around 60% of the sale, within one year offline, which includes both retail and corporate sales, started contributing around 40% to the total sale. people really love the German audio technology and it’s a straight upward graph since inception in india.

Which are the areas from where maximum demand is coming for the Blaupunkt products in India? as i shared earlier, our online contribution is around 60% of the total sale followed by offline sale which is evenly distributed between Corporate & retail sale. Courtesy online channel, our sale is pretty evenly-distributed across india, almost in line with geographical distribution of the population. if we further

dwell into this, i think Tier 1 towns are giving us better sale v/s smaller towns and this could be because Blaupunkt in old days was more associated with Tier 1 cities where most of the cars were sold.

After sales service remains an issue for majority of electronics companies. What is your approach to it? i must say this is the most critical part of the sale and only good service can generate “repeat sales” for the brand. Since we sell across india and it goes to each nook and corner of the country, we have devised a different strategy to cater to our customer than setting up service centres in different cities. anyways, for a BT headphone worth 1500, it’s not fair for customer to travel 10-20kms to go and visit a service centre. He will perhaps end up spending more on commuting than the product cost. We typically follow 100% replacement policy for most of our products and hence the best way to service them is to “Home service” for most of the products, we pick them up from their respective homes and deliver the units back to their homes only. We have three replacement and service centres in mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and we take care of this from these locations. We have a Toll free number 18004334333, which is completely operational even in these hard times.

There is a parallel grey market in India thriving on the 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? This is not too huge a problem for our products, specifically since for certain products the asp is not very high and for others, after sales support is a huge point which push customers to seek the right channel to buy our products. The biggest differentiation for sure is “after sales service” which enables consumers to buy from the right channel. To further strengthen this, our marketing team has launched and further strengthening the “loyalty program” for our genuine customers.

Please tell us something about R&D and innovation at Blaupunkt? Any plan to expand your product portfolio? all the three verticals are constantly evolving, adding products across categories. Since we are talking about Blaupunkt audio specifically here, i will focus on that exclusively. as i mentioned earlier, we started with Home audio products and established ourselves as leader in Soundbar categories and recently in 2019, we strengthened our presence in truly wireless categories with our series of BTW earphones. Over next few months, you will see a lot of new products getting added into these two categories as well as portfolio getting expanded to towers and multimedia speakers where we made fresh entries.

The emergence of IOT has opened a new avenue of growth for many tech firms. Do you have any plan to leverage this trend? yes, this has opened a new window of opportunity for us. We have already launched few Bluetooth speakers which support Siri & Google. New in line is an entire range of product portfolio which will support alexa. We are expecting this launch to happen within next three months.

How do you look at the impact of coronavirus outbreak on electronics industry, audio in particular? We can see it as both pessimistically and optimistically. One way of it is that it has practically completely washed off our Q1/Q4 (Jan-feb-march) revenue. We were earlier struggling in February due to its outbreak in China and our factories couldn’t fulfill our orders and when they were coming back to work, the demand side completely tanked in india. We are sitting on Zero sale now and it’s getting tougher by the day.

On the other side and if i look at it optimistically, this happened in the months which are generally not too big from demand and sales perspective. any such incident happening in season time, say in the months starting from august to November, would have really broken our backs. also, since there were New year holidays in China, we were enough stocked up to handle supply shortages in February.

all said and done, these are extremely testing times of our country and we are firmly standing behind our prime minister to sail out of it together.

Any idea, how much time it will take to recover from the crisis? i would wish this to end tomorrow but looking at the current trends and also understanding the way it’s unfolding globally, we should consider ourselves lucky if we can come back to normalcy starting may. i think a lot of this will depend on the way we all stand together and respect social distancing. Having said that, i think this is giving birth to a new digital revolution which we never expected to unfold so soon and so aggressively.n

“One thing which is uncompromised and unacceptable globally in Blaupunkt is “Quality”. While sound and product quality was always Blaupunkt strengths, we further worked on packaging and high bass sound to suit it to Indian market requirements. When you sell online, the packaging quality requirements are much more stringent compared to global standards”