Like what you see?
The Parafait Series: Funky Zone now runs on Parafait!
Here’s sharing some joy with all of you: Parafait is now live at Funky Zone, Delhi. The implementation was done last week, and all’s well. (Except that some of our team mates are still recovering from the Delhi dust and cold).
The Parafait Series: Industry Chronicles
As part of Parafait design and sales, we’ve traveled to various parts of India and met many knowledgeable people in the industry. We thought that it would be good to pen down our experiences in the form of a short blog post here.
The FEC industry in India has really grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. Our interactions with several players – FEC owners, FEC consultants, Game machine manufacturers and traders have given us a lot of insight and inputs about the industry and their needs. We felt that Delhi and Amdavad (Ahmedabad for the non-locals) have the highest number of FECs and traders (We need to confirm this finding. And we have not visited Bombay yet). While there are a few big houses that own and operate large FEC chains across India (forms 20% of the industry), there is a vast majority (remaining 80%) of small players operating one to a few FECs in select locations. The approach and needs of both these categories of players are distinctly different. But one need was common and clear – everyone wanted more visibility and control over their operations, and hence wanted to move away from coin operated game machines. We also saw various models that the FEC owners were adopting to run their operations including shared floor space, renting out a few machines to shopping mall owners and holiday resorts, franchisee models and of course the corporate style of functioning with clear divisions for marketing, operations and IT. On quizzed ‘Why do you want a card based management system?, the replies we got were also varied. While some responded saying that they just want to keep up with the times, others mentioned they wanted to reduce pilferage opportunities (Apparently, some store owners felt that they were losing up to 10% of their revenues due to pilferage), and some others mentioned they wanted to increase sales through customer loyalty programs. But most of the people we talked to were very bullish on the opportunities in this segment, primarily due to the popularity of malls, and just like every mall needs a food court it also needs entertainment centers.
Because of the convergence of various entertainment channels (food courts, shops, entertainment centers), some of the operators were also interested in extending Parafait to be the payment gateway for the food courts as well. We have parked this thought for our future product.
While we met many game machine manufacturers in India, the FEC owners still rely on imported machines when it comes to machine design and finish. We figured that FEC owners feel that the Indian products still have some way to go in the ‘look ‘n feel’ area. (But we should say that the Air Hockey tables produced by Indian manufacturers are very close or on par with those from their foreign counterparts).
The traders in India import machines from various parts of the world (Italy, China, USA) – machines in various stages of use. Those are then refurbished and sold to the FEC operators here. They also deal in Indian products, and some of them have gone into manufacturing themselves.
In summary, the industry can definitely do with a lot of help from technologists, and we are glad that Parafait has to some degree filled certain gaps that exist. Semnox – India’s leading FEC solutions provider, is committed to go all the way in providing this industry with all the help that it possibly can.
Other Developments
- We are now a member of the Indian Association of Amusement Parks and Industries (www.iaapi.org). This membership opens us up to a large network of FEC owners, traders, manufacturers and competitors and we are very excited about this.
- Our team is currently in Delhi implementing Parafait at a leading FEC in that region. More on that later.
-
About this Site
This is the weblog of Semnox. Go to the Semnox home page
-
The Parafait SeriesRead all about our award winning FEC Debit card System, Parafait, here. Click on the category 'The Parafait Series' (on the left column) to see all posts related to Pafafait.
-
The Sparkling Minds
