Bangalore: The glow on serial entrepreneur Tiger Ramesh’s face matches the brightness of the light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in his sparsely occupied new office. Ramesh has turned entrepreneur for a fourth time, placing bets on the emerging market for LED lighting.
After selling Cicada Resorts to Café Coffee Day in December, Ramesh has now teamed up with Kumar Ramachandran, chief executive of Vignani Technologies Pvt. Ltd, an Intel Capital and Jafco Ventures-funded start-up, to set up a holding firm, Vignani Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Vignani Solutions has just begun rolling out LED lights for commercial office space. He isn’t disclosing the names of some of the big IT firms he expects to clinch deals with, but as a model building, Vignani has powered a new six-storeyed campus of iGate Global Solutions Ltd.
Entrepreneurial drive: Tiger Ramesh expects sales of Rs400-500 crore in three-four years. Hemant Mishra / Mint
The idea is to convince the corporate world that LED is not only “green” but that the return on investment can take just one year if the usage is more than 8 hours a day, says Ramesh.
The Tiger in his name comes partly from his love of wildlife and partly from a combination of his initials (T.G. Ramesh—he says TGR became Tiger).
“There’s not a single incandescent or CFL (compact fluorescent light) in this building,” says Ramesh, adding that the Karnataka chief minister will inaugurate the building later this month. Vignani Solutions is positioning itself in an LED market that’s in its infancy and caters primarily to decorative lighting and portables lights such as hand-held torches.
“Its application in lighting has come up in last five years but in the next four-five years LED will change this industry,” says Kumar Ramesh, industry analyst, environment and building technology practice, Frost and Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East. He sees the lighting industry at the cusp of yet another cyclical change, barely three-four years after CFL’s entry into India.
LED started as low-energy indicators—glowing green and red lights in several electronic devices including a variety of remote controls—but are gradually replacing traditional sources of white light. At its heart lies a semiconductor component that emits light when powered by electricity.
As the world scrambles for cleaner and energy-saving technologies, LED looks promising—the wasteful incandescent bulb is already on its way out and its replacement, the CFL, doesn’t measure up on the environment scale as its toxic mercury content is difficult to dispose of safely. Moreover, LEDs last about 10 times longer than CFLs, using half as much energy.