Company News

A Switched-On Entrepreneur

The story of Europasonic is the story of how one man came to Britain with nothing and now owns a £7.5m turnover Manchester-based group of companies which has a factory in India that employs 400 workers.

That man is Jaswinder Kohli. He arrived here from India in 1968 and worked as a factory nightshift labourer earning £15 a week. On Sundays he worked on a stall in Petticoat Lane, the famous London market. With two brothers, he saved £2,000 and got his own stall there, selling fancy and electrical goods. Then, in 1969, he rented a grocery shop on Clapham High Street. The following year he was asked to manage a branch of Binatone Ltd on Bury New Road in Manchester, selling fancy and electrical goods.

But when Binatone closed its branches, he was made redundant. Undeterred, he opened his own shop in Great Ducie Street, called Lucky Cash & Carry. He then bought a shop for £250 in Bury New Road and moved there in 1974, renaming the company Europa Wholesale.

In 1976 he became an importer of Far East fancy goods, watches, lighters, jewellery, car radios and speakers. This expansion meant he needed to rent space in a former cotton mill called Britannia Works, still on Bury New Road.

In 1981 the business became a limited company and bought the Sherborne Rubber Works building opposite the mill and moved in 1984. He then saw the opportunity to develop an exclusive trade importing CB radios and accessories via Ireland.

With the privatisation of the telecommunications industry, he decided to start manufacturing telephone accessories but he soon realised that, because of labour costs, it would be cheaper to manufacture in India.

Joint Venture
So, in 1992, he embarked on a joint venture with Enrich Agro Foods, an Indian Coca-Cola bottler, which took a 35 per cent stake in the company. With Enrich, a factory was built next to New Delhi International Airport and a new company was formed called Universal Electronics & Communications.

Today it employs 400 workers while the UK operation has 35 staff in Manchester in its sales, design, accounts, quality control, packaging and warehousing departments. When manufacturing was transferred to India five years ago, no jobs were lost in Manchester, however, the workers being redeployed into the packaging and quality control departments. Staff turnover is very low and three employees have been with the company for over 15 years.

By now, though, the business had grown to such an extent that stock was being held in seven or eight warehouses. To cope with the volume of business, Jaswinder’s son Nick, who had joined the company as managing director after graduating from the London School of Economics, decided to buy Britannia Works, knock it down and erect a purpose-built distribution centre in its place to bring everything under one roof for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

This 26,000 sq. ft building, representing a £1m investment, will be completed and officially opened this month.

Two companies are now run from the Manchester headquarters – Eurosonic Communications and Boosterpoint, a new venture which was set up in Canada in 1996 to cover the North American market. In the UK, Eurosonic is the sole agent for Mitsubishi audio/visual products, supplies 2,000 different lines of electrical accessories and does £2m worth of business a year with its biggest customer, Tandy.

It will sell five million Mitsubishi video tapes this year and joint managing director Harpreet Chadha, Jaswinder’s son-in-law, predicts that this figure will rise to seven million next year. Harpreet is now targeting the multiple retailers, supplying such chains as Littlewoods and Poundstretcher and looking to break into the DIY sheds market such as Homebase and B&Q.

As technical sales director Zulf Khan explains, the company can offer a comprehensive range of quality products because the Indian factory is ISO 9002 accredited which means it maintains British standards and, in fact, uses British components for assembly. The products are also ASTA-licensed to the highest safety standards and the packaging is user-friendly and recyclable.

Achievement
As for the future, Nick says the business plan is to increase the companies’ combined turnover from the current £7.5m to £10m in the coming year. Quite an achievement, as he points out, when you consider that this will be through sales of products that typically cost less than £1 each.

And even more of an achievement when you consider that Jaswinder Kohli was a £15-a-week nightshift factory labourer 30 years ago.

Two years ago he was able to hand over to the next generation a business that operates on three continents and which he built up virtually single-handedly through sheer hard work, determination and business acumen.

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