Founded in 2009, eAge Electronics Pvt. Ltd. is a professional hi-tech organisation based at Gurgaon in Haryana. The company is engaged in manufacturing, sale and promotion of a complete range of LED lighting products. In 2017, eAge entered into a joint venture with Greenlux Oy, a Finnish LED lighting company that specialises in office, industrial, warehousing, parking and hospitality lighting. The JV has successfully supplied and installed Greenlux Oy fixtures across the globe for various projects.
The company adapts highly innovative approach in order to provide tailor-made lighting solutions across all domains i.e. hotels, hospitals, industries, architectural for both indoor and outdoor applications. “Our team of professionals is well-trained to offer best service and technical advice to our valued clients. We care for buyers’ satisfaction through quality and timely delivery,” says Dhruv Mahajan, the company’s vice president while speaking to LED World editorial team. We conversed at length, edited excerpts of which are here:
How has been your journey so far?
We are not new in this field and are operational since 2009 thereby completing a decade of our presence while catering to the industry and its stakeholders. We started off primarily by taking care of retrofit lighting projects. We work with Bharti Airtel extensively pan-India to help them save energy through the installation of LEDs. Eventually, we also started diversifying our product ranges. We then got into tubelights, which we distributed for a while. Slowly but surely, we realised that we don’t want to be a player who is a jack of all trades but master of none.
What are you currently focusing on?
We are currently focusing on areas where consumers have high demand and want us to offer fixtures which are highly efficient and competitively priced. India is a price sensitive market and a point of friction with LEDs over a period of time has been consumer’s sensitivity to price. We feel there is an urgent need to educate the audience which doesn’t ordinarily understand the USPs and utilities of LED lighting and factors that help differentiate quality from low grade fixtures. For most of the customers, it is just a new technology.
Amidst this ambiguity, how did you find the way forward?
We set out on the path moving away from retrofitting. Three years after our inception, we decided to invest heavily in product development. It was aimed at increasing our gamut of products and ensuring that we can provide our customers a more versatile range of products to cover most of their requirements. Our big turn came a couple years back in 2017, when we tied up with a well established Finnish lighting specialist Greenlux Oy, which is an IMS supplier for IKEA globally.
Given our partnership, we became an official manufacturer for Greenlux Oy and have been successfully supplying lighting fixtures to all their clients including IKEA since last two years. This has alleviated our production capacity and ability as we now have the knowledge and compliance systems to produce international quality LED lighting products, as we have to adhere to European standards.
Do you offer same products to your Indian customers?
Yes if they are willing to pay. But the price points are pain points in the Indian market. Hence, we developed cost-efficient variants of the same product for our domestic clients. All the products are well-received and we hope that it will be further appreciated in time to come. Today, we offer a full range of down lighters, panel lights, linear fittings, bay lights, flood lights, street lights, landscape lights, underwater lights, etc.
Going forward, we also realised that probably industrial is the stream where our strength lies as far as lighting is concerned. This is because it is more technically demanding in specification and achieving that is not easy for all players.
Any new product(s) that eAge has added to its portfolio recently. What are the specific attributes?
We have developed an under-water lighting series that is based on magnetic induction. The biggest problem with underwater lighting is the fact that our clients need to empty the water body if the lighting fixtures are to be replaced in case of any failure. Our new lighting range has made it possible to do that without emptying the water body, which is a huge cost for most of the customers. The operating voltage is 12-24V, which is standard for underwater lighting. However, the USP is the absence of cable in the lamp unit as it has been observed that the major ingress of water is from the cable, which makes our fixture more reliable. We have received very good feedback for this product.
We have also developed lights for parking lots and warehousing. This section of our product line is pretty different as a lot of focus has gone into developing the heat sink, which has been designed to manage and dissipate heat 24×7 while the units remain operational. It is a cold product and can run throughout the day without even giving a feel of heat. Thus it helps diminish air conditioning and cooling loads in areas it is adopted. It is available in 50W-110W each, and can be set in different frames depending upon the specific requirement. The modules are highly-efficient. This is also because we have used the expertise from Greenlux and integrated it in all our designs.
Apart from these, what special do you have in your product portfolio?
For industrial applications, we have come up with quite a few innovative and cost-efficient products. Few of our products are designed to operate in temperatures ranging from 50 degree C up to -30 degree C with 130 lumens per watt, suitable for parking lots and warehousing. We have been in process of upgrading this range of fixtures, which will then be used in cold storage as well, while retaining the same attributes. We are now developing products that can withstand -40 degree C.
Apart from that, we cater to hospitality industry in a big way, which is a very important vertical for us. We have successfully helped local enterprises save large costs by providing quality Indian fixtures in place of highly expensive European ones. We have been able to design such fixtures by adopting top of the line reflectors and lenses that provide the same desired effects as our European competitors. We have also developed a cost-effective state-of-the-art flood light/hi-bay fixture that can be used in sports stadiums and other expanded spaces like facilities, airports, ports, etc. We are about to complete the development of LED products for horticulture, which we are hoping to introduce soon.
Where is your plant?
Our plant is located in Gurgaon, which is spread across 28,000 sqft of area over three storeys with adaptable capacity depending upon the requirements. We have exclusive vendors for dyes and moulds, but for other components, we manufacture ourselves. Our manufacturing and quality team have been working together to ensure consistent quality and timely delivery. We are a trusted OEM/ODM partner to a couple of lighting brands due to our specialisation in professional LED design, development and production. We are looking to expand this further.
What is your take on competition gearing up in the market?
Competition is tough. However, our main competition is with ourselves to make the right products that can solve issues for our customers. This is also the main objective at eAge.
How is eAge different from its competitors?
The idea at eAge is to provide customer a reliable, cost-effective product that ensures complete satisfaction and long-term peace of mind. What’s the point of having a technology which doesn’t bring customers the peace of mind! Lot of people work with short-term gains in their mind, while at eAge, our logic is a bit different. We try making a customer’s problem our own and then find solutions to solve those problems.
Where can we see eAge in couple of years from now?
We want to continue what we are doing right now i.e. to offer solutions for the problems of our customers and not simply supplying products. What we believe is that if we build or design a product to address specific illumination issues that remain unattended with customers, we would be probably better placed in the market than by simply meeting the existing demand. That’s why we are not competing with anyone, but ourselves to make the right products, in turn, bringing in solutions for our customers.
