US-based Zebra Technologies which majors in barcoding printing registered $4 billion in revenue in 2017 globally and claims that APAC has been showing strong growth over the last few years with governments focusing on digitising its economies.
Talking to ET, Anders Gustafsson, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies, said while the company has grown over 5% each year, APAC region currently contributes over 15% to the company’s business while the other top markets remain North America, Europe, Latin America.
“One of our largest R&D centres is located in India which accommodates around 500 employees. In India, we see a huge demand coming from manufacturing, retail and other online marketplaces,” says Gustafsson, adding that the biggies in e-commerce sectors look for technology solutions majorly for their warehouses. Zebra claims to have spent 10.5% of the global revenue in R&D.
Deep Agarwal, Regional Sales Director-India, Zebra Technologies adds with the growing online competition, a number of offline retailers are also keen to adapt advance technology solutions to increase footfalls. “We are also seeing traction from government and healthcare sectors. For instance, e-challan devices, emergency response system in patrolling vehicles are provided by Zebra.”
He adds that the company which employs more than 7,000 globally, is also in talks with 2-3 state governments in India.
On the technology front, the company says that it is relying on machine learning for predictive maintenance which will send alerts before any feature of a device fails. “In the next 2-3 years, major investments will be into how data is collected to drive decisions post which mobile computing paradigm will change and will initiate computer-human interactions,” says Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer, Zebra Technologies.
