ENTA Businesses
About ENTA
ENTAGROUP Press Release – Archive
COMPANY PROFILE – 2000
Okay, first things first. If you don't know Enta
Technologies other than just reconizing the name from our 'Why pay more?' pages, you're probably wondering why a giant pagoda in dominating this page. Well, any feature on Enta would be imcomplete without it- if you ever visit the company you need have no worries about locating them amongst Telford's many drag industrial estates. "It's an authentic Taiwanese pagoda," explains Sarah Trivedi, Enta's Marketing Executive. "Jason Tsai, Enta's Chairman had all the materials imported from Taiwan and a feng Shui expert lined everything up. Everything here has been arranged according to feng shui, the building has water, filled with Koi-carp, completely surrounding it to protect us and our five acre site has a mound on the boundary which represents a hill to ensure we are all safe and protected. Ther are dragons on the roof and on each corner of the builing there are good and bad sprits. They push away all of the good and bad that is in Enta so there should be peace." Which is probably the most unusual first coversation I have ever had when visiting a distrubutor. It wasn't always thus though. Enta technologies- the Enta name takes the first two letters from both England and Taiwan- was formed in 1990 by Jason Tsai and his office was a bedroom in his house. Jason, who has previously been in sales and marketing with Tatung, focused on keyboards, cases and mice and soon found the need to move into a deicated building. This unit became two, then three, until the present site was purchased, and it came the design for the building: "Jason imported the tiles from Taiwan, and the tilers, as there was no-one in the whole of Europe who could create the pagoda. It took four chinese tilers three months to build. We moved into the building in the easter of 1995 and all of the staff and members helped with the move, which took four days." No doubt the staff's first reaction when they saw the building was 'oh we're going for somrthing to eat first'? "Actually we do get a lot of people coming here thinking this is a chinese restaurant. It has a great atmosphere, everyone enjoys it here and in the summer it's lovely taking a walk around the grounds. There's even a football pitch... Enough about the building. In 1990, Enta's turnover was around ?00,000. For 1999, it will be around ?2 million and there are 115 staff employed at the site. Thats a pretty spectacular griwth, and its not suprising that it hasn't all come from inexpensive PC components: "Historically, Enta is well known for unbranded OEM kit," explains Jon Atherton, Enta's General manager. "However in the last few years things have changed slightly and we now also sell a lot of branded goods, such as Acer notebooks and Microsoft products. Over the last six months we've been number one for Microsoft, and we've also diversified into industrial kit, networking, technical problems, Microsoft NT server and Backoffice etc. We carry around 1,000 lines and our bestsellers are cases, Microsoft operating systems, mice and OEM notebooks.
There 10 people dedicated to notebooks, 2 who repair them and 3 who build them, and we sell around 1,500 notebooks every month. There will be a lot happening in the next six months, we are going to start building PC's in a big way, both bare bones and complete systems. The type of noise we are hearing from our sales people is that retailers' overheads are high in this market. If we build the PC for them we can save them that overhead. so, apart from products at competitive prices, what else do Enta offer retailers? "We are fortunate in that we don't have any loans, everything is owned by Enta and financially we are very strong. The only things we rent are our vending machines. That sends out a message that we will be here for a very long time, whereas a few businesses in our market are going under. We offer good credit terms, the right products,both branded and unbranded, and we offer support in Microsoft products and networking. In Indie Magazine's "Why pay more?" we are often number one. VIP look to us with a smile and we look to them with a smile. Our focus now is on customer service and increasing our product range."Everyone claims to offer a good customer service of course, but Enta have put their mony where their mouth is: "We've invested around half a million pounds on our computer system and we've gone fully live on barcoding. As long as th barcode is correct there will be no picking errors, and every parcel that leaves here is barcoded. We have also invested in a contacts managerin sales, customer service and credit control and every conversation which is made with credit control is logged - so if someone is off ill, someone else can take over and deal with the customer's query." Enta have a lot of customers to deal with. There are over 8,000 live on the database and at least 2,000 of those will have bought in the last two weeks. They include 'off the page' boys, the high street chains and, of course a large number of Indies: "We have been featured in Indie Magazine's 'Why pay more?' for a long timeand we've picked up a lot of customers in the last six months.
some will call us and ask for an item at the price quoted and, even if the item has increased in price, we will always honour the original price if we possibly can. "Indies are very important to us. I spent nine years working for small to medium sized systems builders myself, before joining Enta as a buyer, and Indiesare very loyal. If we give them a good service and a good price and we don't mess them around then hopefully they will be loyal to Enta, and we will be loyal to them. We could have grown a lot bigger than we have. Most distributors will be involved in direct selling in some shape or form but we never have. Enta will only deal with a new customer if they are registered with the VAT office as a computer company - so although we deliver direct to an Indie's customer, we certainly won't deal with that customer should he try to contact us. We don't won't to cheese people off - I know, I was on that side of the fence. This is an example of how we are loyal to our customers." Opening an account with Enta is a painless process - as long as you are registered with the VAT office as a computer company - with just a single form needing to be completed. Trade references are taken up if you want a credit account but those paying CWO or a credit card canbe up and running very quickly. The minimum order is just £200 but if an order comes to £190 they won't quibble about it. And carriage if free, too. Before Christmas, perhaps due to fears over the Millennium Bugs, many customers held off from buying PC's, prompting some punditsto prdict that the PC will not be around in its present form for much longer. Due to their closeness with Microsoft (Enta is 1 of only five 5 Microsoft DSP's), they perhaps are better informed than most about the way the market will be changing in this new millennium: "we as an industry have been very lucky that companies like Intel keep changing their spec, so people are always wanting to upgrade their PC's. It's unlikely a vehicle, which could last you six years. This year we are expecting a big demand for PC's from Febuary onwards and this year's big thing will be LCD monitors, certainly by the end of the year. The industry will keep evolving and now it's faster than ever. A 286 might have lasted six months but the Pentium III may be out of date in two months. "Indies offer their customers the service element, which the multiples don't, and there are many ways companies like Enta can help them. If they are supplying standalone PC's to businesses, for instance, then they should also be installing networks. If they don't have the confidence to install networks then we will train them up if they ask us. It won't cost them a bean. We will even speak to their customers with them if they want us to, to kelp them decide what topology is needed. "The Indies should iversify. Not just sell a PC, but offer the training and maintainance as wll. They know what they are talking about. Some of them are one man bands but they are good business men." So there's a lot more to Enta than being able to supply a keyboard for £2.75 (as they did last month): "We could sell a keyboard for £2 actually, but it's useless and will fall apart. We don't sell crap, we're able to sell a good product at that low a price because we buy in quantity - we sell around 20,000 keyboards every month."
Indie
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