Thursday, September 18, 2014: Matrix Comsec is among the few indigenous product manufacturers in the security and surveillance sector in India, which is focused on marketing its brand in the country. With its manufacturing facility and R&D unit located in Vadodara, the company is committed to keeping pace with the technological revolution in the security and surveillance sector. In a conversation with Electronics Bazaar, Ganesh Jivani, managing director, Matrix Comsec, spoke about the challenges faced by domestic manufacturers, the emerging trends in the security segment and the strategies devised to keep up with the technological developments
EB: How has the CCTV camera market grown in India, particularly over the last two years?
In the last two to three years, the video surveillance market in India has witnessed an explosive growth of about 25 per cent or even higher.
EB: How much real manufacturing of CCTV cameras and access control devices is happening in India?
Unfortunately, the manufacturing scenario in the security and surveillance sector is not very impressive. There is negligible manufacturing happening in this sector. However, the access control and identification segment when compared to video surveillance is doing better in terms of domestic manufacturing. Overall, both these markets are flooded with imported products.
EB: What are your recommendations for boosting the manufacture of CCTV cameras and access control devices in India?
To promote domestic manufacturing, the government should follow the automobile import policy of imposing some nominal but uniform duty of 10-15 per cent on all imports, irrespective of category and class. The government should enforce identical customs duty rates for importing raw material, components, products and equipment. This will attract all classes of manufacturers to set up their plants in India. We need this impetus for about five years to create the ecosystem required for manufacturing in the security and electronics domains.
EB: What are the new trends in the global CCTV camera and access control devices markets?
The main technological trend driving the present video surveillance industry is the Internet Protocol (IP) solutions. The awareness regarding higher security and other benefits provided by video surveillance solutions is increasing rapidly. The transition from analogue cameras to IP video surveillance is happening on a large scale. Today, IP cameras offer higher resolution in terms of mega-pixels (MP). IP cameras with 2 MP and 3 MP are becoming the general norm in the industry and 5 MP IP cameras are also used for special applications. These cameras simultaneously support multiple streams with better security and networking capabilities. In addition, new IP cameras also support intelligent video analytics functions. Also, the resolution in analogue cameras has improved from 600 TV lines to 700 TV lines, and even higher.
There have been significant developments in intelligent video analysis (IVA), which enable people-counting, face-recognition, finding missing objects, etc, which is further enhancing security. Mega projects like city surveillance are also a trend that is catching on.
EB: What, according to you, are the latest technological advancements in access control devices in India?
Access control devices are evolving on two to three tracks. The most important is the biometric identification technologies being used. In addition to fingerprint readers, face recognition and palm vein readers, finger vein readers and retina scanners are also getting popular. The other track on which these devices are moving ahead is the interfaces that they support. Outdated Wiegand is making way for IP-over-Ethernet and wireless interfaces like Wi-Fi, 3G/4G/LTE. All these are the latest technologies entering the India market.
EB: What are the segments driving the growth of CCTV cameras, and which cities witnessed good demand in 2013?
Video security and surveillance is experiencing demand from all sectors. Though demand from the bigger cities is huge, surprisingly, demand from Class B cities is also picking up, which is a good sign for the industry.
EB: What do you manufacture at your Vadodara facility?
We have a modern manufacturing facility at Waghodia about 20 km from Vadodara. Here, we manufacture the entire Cosec range of access control and time-attendance products and the Satatya range of video surveillance solutions like network video recorders, hybrid video recorders and digital video recorders, apart from our telecom products.
EB: What manufacturing challenges do you face in India? What solutions do you suggest?
Manufacturing needs easy access to raw material, equipment and skills. This is possible only if the entire ecosystem is well developed. Therefore, manufacturing must be broad-based. Manufacturing cannot survive for only narrow or specific product categories. Unfortunately, the raw materials and components required to manufacture our products are not readily available in India. We are forced to import all major components from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the US. This leads to an increase in input costs, a high lead time, poor support and makes it difficult to collaborate with our vendors.
To promote domestic manufacturing, the government should adopt a nominal uniform duty structure. It is important that the government pays more attention in developing an ecosystem to boost manufacturing of security products in the country. We have a large and growing domestic market. No company or country worth its name can ignore the Indian market. With high customs duty, a company manufacturing in India will have lower costs and can easily compete with imported products. When one company sets up its manufacturing plant in India, its competitors have no option but to follow suit or lose the market. This process would ensure that India becomes a hub for all world class manufacturers. From this point, the percolation of world class technologies, knowledge and skills would be a natural, logical and inevitable process.
EB: What are Matrix’s business strategies to compete in the Indian market?
Our business strategies revolve around product differentiation, a clear value-proposition, channel orientation and support. To begin with, Matrix products are amply differentiated in architecture, functions and features from the competition. In marketing and sales, we believe in a strong distribution and channel network. We have more than 600 channel partners spread across the globe who are busy marketing, selling and supporting Matrix products. Apart from India, our products are available in Europe, America, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. Our marketing team works closely with these channel partners to ensure that the products serve the communication and security needs of the customers efficiently, faster and for a longer period. We also have a special customer care department, which provides prompt assistance to our clients. Finally, we invest a lot of our resources in after sales support to the end customers and channel partners, ensuring complete satisfaction to all our customers.
We work very closely with our channel partners in all areas including marketing, sales, supply and support. They benefit from cutting-edge technology, field-proven solutions; training sessions in marketing, sales and on the technical side; as well as in solutions design assistance, presentations and sales calls. Immediate supplies, technical support during installation, technical help during customer complaints as well as efficient and cost-effective return material authorisation (RMA) services are also part of the support we offer.
Electronics Bazaar, South Asia’s No.1 Electronics B2B magazine
