BPL makes a comeback

A household name in the 1990s, but driven out of the market in the late 2000s due to tough competion from Samsung and the likes, consumer electronics major BPL on Friday announced its come back by unveiling a slew of offerings for the home automation and surveillance segment under the brand BPL iQ series.

The company is eyeing a 10% market share in home automation and surveillance on the back of government’s ambitious programme to develop 100 smart cities.

“At present, the market size of the home automation and surveillance segment is over Rs 3,000 crore and we are aiming to have around 10% market share in the next 2-3 years,” BPL CEO K Vijaya Kumar said.

“We are very bullish on the businesses that we are venturing into. The total market size of the market for automation is guess-estimated to be Rs 600 crore and we are targeting to corner 20% of this market in the next three years or so. Our expectations from the surveillance business, which is pegged at Rs 2,500 crore is that we should be doing business worth around Rs 100 crore in the first year of operations and then scale it up to around Rs 250 crore in the next three years,” Kumar said.

“These are achievable targets since these are hugely after sales service oriented industries and the BPL service network with over 6000 touch-points is unparalleled.” For smart city projects, BPL has partnered with technology major Cisco to jointly bid and participate in some of the smart cities project. “The partnership is for some projects. In some, we may bid alone also,” he said.