Panasonic Creating Solutions based on Products and Platforms: Vijay Wadhwan
Panasonic has recently designated India as the regional hub to drive growth and build deeper inroads into the fast emerging Asiatic, Middle Eastern and Western economies. Starting from India, the company wants to create a knowhow to address consumers who are based out of India and then take the knowledge to emerging markets.
Vijay Wadhwan, Head System and Solution Business, Panasonic India, tells us more.
BW CIO: What are some of the newer enterprise and government projects that Panasonic is venturing into?
Vijay Wadhwan: Last year, we launched our digital signage solution (called signedge), a platform that has been designed for companies to showcase their creative advertising and branding campaigns in today’s fast information driven world. Further, under our Toughbook division, with the launch of our latest FZ T1 and L1 fully rugged devices, we are looking at entering the lucrative handheld market in order to widen our business prospects.
BW CIO: What is your B2B growth strategy in India?
Vijay Wadhwan: Panasonic, in India, is looking at creating solutions based on products and platforms, rather than a point product vendor for its customers. To that effect, we have already started working on it and have launched signedge as a signage platform last year at infocomm. We will continue to work on this strategy and would be launching new platforms for other businesses in 2019 as well.
BW CIO: What are some of the new initiatives you have undertaken within the business segment recently?
Vijay Wadhwan: Earlier in 2018, we launched our Digital Signedge solution, a business offering that can be used as a platform for companies to showcase their creative advertising and branding campaigns in today’s fast information driven world. We are also working in the collaboration space to make our offerings more comprehensive.
BW CIO: What is your outlook towards the Indian security market when it comes to video surveillance and VDP segments?
Vijay Wadhwan: The Indian security and surveillance market is at a fascinating stage. We are moving from security in closed spaces to security of public places, which has led to spending from both government and the private sector.
The segment is an imperative focus point from the perspective of smart city development as well, which has encouraged government to take radical steps for its development. The UP government for example connected its 36 courts with video surveliience cameras, and Panasonic executed this installation.
With IoT and tech-enabled security solutions, residents are relying less on professional security guards and more on video door phones and other technologies that lets users monitor their activity from their phones. Residential segment is one of the biggest adopter of video door phones, especially the effluent high rise apartments, gated communities and integrated townships.
BW CIO: How is your Toughbook business been doing?
Vijay Wadhwan: India is a key growth market for Panasonic’s Toughbook segment, and will continue to be so because of its widespread consumer acceptance and large scale growth possibilities which can drive the segment for years to come.
We have supplied over 6,000 devices to the police services of J&K, Kerala, Bangalore, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and the country of Bangladesh. With the launch of our new products we are now robustly foraying into the handheld devices market and target newer segments such as logistics, retail and intelligent warehousing, segments that have grown widely over the last few years due to the boom in the e commerce category.
We are already the market leaders in ruggedized laptop and tablet segment, and are now looking to position ourselves in the handheld segment which is growing at the rate of 15-20 percent YoY.
BW CIO: Can you give us some insight on the way forward for Panasonic in India
Vijay Wadhwan: Panasonic is seamlessly moving towards a solutions-based approach, creating customized holistic solution models for businesses in order to drive customer satisfaction. To further enhance our solutions based approach in the country, we are currently looking at bringing imperative technologies from Japan to India.
