Opportunity in a Recession

By Ramesh Akkineni

The IT sector was then in a worldwide recession, which Mr Goel felt was the perfect time to
start a new business in the very same industry.

""As a real entrepreneur, you should be able to do more than just find available
opportunities, because if there's an obvious opportunity everybody will see it, and the
established players will take it before you do,'' he says.

""You have to spot the threats that offer you an opportunity. So basically, when everybody
was walking out of IT distribution, I saw it as an opportunity to go in.''

Badly hit by the recession, computer-parts suppliers were more open to working with smaller
outfits like eSys.

""What we had to offer was efficiency,'' says Mr Goel. ""We beat out the big boys by having
a reputation for having low costs. Since we didn't have the money, we watched out for every
single cent that we spent and we tried to optimise every single cent.''

Ask him just what exactly his firm does now, and he will tell you that eSys ""is in the
business of efficiency''.

""Google makes online search efficient, and eBay makes buying and selling things
efficient - We make business transactions efficient by breaking down each transaction into
different steps and finding the cheapest way to perform each step.''

This process allowed Mr Goel to identify that India had the cheapest manpower costs for
services and that Singapore was most cost-effective for logistics.

The company's back office, which runs the global business, operates out of India while the
firm's central hub is located here.

Mr Goel realised that he would cut his costs almost by half by locating production
factories in Singapore rather than by making parts in China and shipping them here for
distribution.

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