Persistence: the key to entrepreneurial success

It’s quite unusual for an auto ancillary unit to have Wings as its name. But not quite if the founder served the Indian Air Force for over 2 decades. Late wing commander Indrajeet Bhalla launched Wings Automobile Products in 1983 to manufacture ignition coils for 2-wheelers. After his demise in 2014, his son Rohit Bhalla has been at the helm of the company. Like his father Rohit has taken the company to newer heights. Wings Automobile Products today has emerged as a preferred supplier to OEMs like Hero MotoCorp, Yamaha, Suzuki, Royal Enfield, Honda amongst others. And this has resulted in the company commanding a 30% share in 2-wheeler horns market and 40% share in 2-wheelers ignitions coils.

Wings Automobile

The start like any entrepreneurial venture was not easy. After a decade of struggle, the big breakthrough for Wings Automobile Products came in 1997, when Hero Motocorp contracted the company to supply ignition coils for its bikes. After finally seeing success and becoming a hot favorite with its OEMs, Wing Automobile Products decided to expand its portfolio offering. The venture added products like high-tension ignition coils, horns, ignition modules, interlocked auto stacked core pack assemblies, noise-suppressor cap and power transformers. And the results are for all to see as its top line grew by 5x from 26 crores rupees in 2008-09 to 142 crores rupees in 2016-17..

The story of Latent view is a bit different one. Founded in 2006 by three friends Venkat Viswanathan, Ramesh Hariharan and Pramad Jandhyala the company has developed over 20 proprietary solutions to slice and dice consumer behaviour as also sales, finance and supply chain analytics. No wonder it has emerged as the trusted analytics partner for some of the Fortune 500 companies like Google, Microsoft, Pepsico, PayPal and eBay.

By providing a reliable and real-time analytics the company has been able to retain 83% of its customers. And interestingly, 53% of its new business is via referrals. The primary reason for the customer’s stickiness is because of its investment in R&D. LatentView which invests 5% of its revenue in R&D has set-up an in-house R&D centre Idea Labs. In addition, the company has also established a data analytics laboratory in association with IIT Madras to conduct advance research programs in data analytics. This has aided the company to stay ahead of the technology curve. For instance, the company is currently betting big on Artificial Intelligence, and working towards integrating it into its products and solution.

Latent View