Mohan Reddy: Getting into the big league

Overcoming competition is not new for the 52-year-old B V R Mohan Reddy, chairman and managing director of Infotech Enterprises.

However, when he was competing for an order from the $18 billion Bombardier Transportation, the Canadian air and rail transport major, he felt a bit nervous because the list of competitors included the who's who of India's IT industry Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Satyam.

At stake was an order of over $70 million spread over eight years for providing a range of services in design engineering for the railway industry.

It took more than six months for Mohan Reddy, Sudhir Sethi, the executive director of Infotech and their team to convince the Canadian company to bag the order.

By the time Bombardier was ready to question them about their domain expertise and capabilities, they were ready with three top professionals, two from a local locomotive manufacturer and one from the Indian Railway Services.

Said a beaming Reddy, "Of course, we had the lowest price advantage, being a mid sized company. Apart from that the speed and flexibility with which we took our decisions, helped us win the order."

There's every reason for Reddy to be happy because Infotech is going through a rough patch for the last two quarters and the order from Bombardier is expected to ease all that.

For the first quarter of the current fiscal, the company's net profit plunged by 70 per cent to Rs 1.88 crore (Rs 18.8 million), compared to last year.

Reddy expects the worst will be over with one more bad quarter and the second growth phase for Infotech will start from October this year.

A major reason behind the decline in performance was because of the plateaued business from Pratt & Whitney, the company's biggest overseas customer, which contributed about Rs 75 crore (Rs 750 million) to Infotech's consolidated turnover of Rs 165 crore (Rs 1.65 billion) last fiscal.

"Business from Pratt & Whitney had plateaued as about 65 per cent of its work could not be outsourced to India because of the US government restriction way to overcome this problem, by opening a near-shore center in Puerto Rico," Reddy explains.

A gold medallist in mechanical engineering from Andhra University, Reddy's 29 year old career began as a shop floor engineer in the DCM group in 1974. After two more job stints at Mico and HCL, he joined OMC Computers as its CEO.

"After working for about nine years, with just two per cent stake in the company and 100 per cent responsibility, I realised that I was burning myself out and left to set up Infotech with Rs 25 lakh (Rs 2.5 million) equity. There was a Rs 97 lakh debt assistance from IDBI," Reddy reminisces.

A firm believer in God, Reddy adorns Swamy Ayyappa mala and visits Sabarimala every year. Though, he likes to live a simple life, he could not resist from migrating to a Mercedes recently to match his peers in the local IT community.

When asked about his vision for the company, Reddy says he wants to see his company attain $100 million turnover by March 2006!