Japan’s Akai relaunches range of consumer electronics in India

NEW DELHI - Akai, the Japanese consumer electronics brand that introduced inexpensive television sets to the Indian market in the late 1990s, is making a comeback with a wide range of products from TV sets to microwave owens.

The 80-year-old company intends to sell the products by importing some of these from its Southeast Asian units as also sourcing from Indian firms by extending their technology under what in industry parlance is called original equipment manufacture.

The Akai brand is being relaunched in the country by Global Brands Enterprise Solutions, promoted by a group of investors led by Pranay Dhabhai, which has exclsive licence for the brand in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

“Our Akai portfolio will include high-definition television sets, colour TVs, washing machines, microwave owens, DVD and home theater systems,” Dhabhai, whose company also has the rights for China’s Hair’s owens and modular kitchens, told reporters here.

“We are re-launching the brand with a total of 37 models across these segments,” he said and added that they will be priced in a range of Rs.2,400 to Rs.55,000. “We are targeting an annual revenue of Rs.435 crore in the next 12 months.”

Explaining some innovative products under their portfolio, Dhabhai said some of the TV models have video UBBs, or provision to insert pen drives, that can enable viewers to watch movies or similar programmes without having to own a DVD set.

“Recent trends in the world, call for screens with higher resolutions for true representation of images on screen, therefore, we have introduced new range of high definition TVs,” he said.

Global Brands officials declined to give the exact figure for which the brand license contract was sealed with the Akai’s parent company Grande Holdings, a Chinese conglomerate headquartered in Singapore, which also owns other electronic brands like Nakamichi and Sansui.