TVS Electronics to make set top box

Venkatachari Jagannathan
31 July 2003

(HITS is the distribution point in the sky for satellite TV signals. Under this system, all the channel signals — pay and free — are aggregated at one place and decrypted first. After encrypting them again all under one common signal, this gets uplinked to a satellite, to be beamed down to MSOs/cable operators and to the homes. With one HITS infrastructure the whole country could be covered.)

Declining to disclose the off-take volume agreed by the Mumbai-based Broadband Pacenet, Gopal Srinivasan, director, TVS Electronics, says: "This order will fetch us at least Rs 10 crore per quarter and will start from the final quarter of the current financial year. We have also signed with an American company to contract-manufacture electronic boards used in medical equipment."

"The electronic manufacturing services (EMS) business group will grow by 100 per cent by the end of this year with minimal additional investment," he adds. During the first six months of the current fiscal (January-June 2003) the division contributed Rs 19.51 crore after deducting inter-segment sales of Rs 47.13 crore.

According to him, the company has also bagged an order for the supply of an unspecified number of uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems from an American company. In addition, TVS Electronics got a huge order for point of sales equipment from Syngenta, which wants to automate its retailers in various villages.

"On the whole, we want to migrate from being known as dot-matrix printers to manufacturer of varied products," he says. For the company, dot-matrix printers and computer keyboards form the major revenue source. The company also makes UPS and point-of-sale terminals. The products and solutions business group contributed Rs 106 crore to the first half turnover of Rs 126 crore.