Right Message-Entrepreneurship runs in the blood of ACL Wireless CEO Sanjay Goyal
The Economic Times, March 19, 2006
Sanjay Goyal’s gamble six years ago is paying off. His company, ACL Wireless, a developer and provider of mobile applications, has been ranked the fastest growing technology company in India, and the fifteenth in Asia Pacific by Deloitte
Touche Tohmatsu.
At that time, in 2000, Goyal already owned a company that was as brick and mortar as could be – Angelique International Ltd, a project engineering, procurement and construction company with revenues of $10 million ($40 million currently). Set up by him at the age of 24 in 1993, Angelique worked on multilaterally- funded projects in about 10 developing countries in Central Asia, India and China. But then, with technology getting to be the most happening of sectors, Goyal just had to be a part of it. Unlike other Indian IT companies, however, Goyal didn’t get into the services side. He set up a product company and looked for customers, not overseas, but in the domestic market itself. A Hong Kong-based venture fund, called Inter-Asia, liked his ideas on instant messaging for the mobile industry in India, and was ready to invest in them. “Technology products were risky, and the Indian mind-set is risk-averse – Indians don’t invest in high risk companies,” Goyal, CEO of ACL Wireless, recalls.
For Goyal though, entrepreneurship has been in his blood. Their family has owned oil and flour mills and his mother too has run a crystalware business. Though a graduate in mechanical engineering, it wasn’t long before the tech sector beckoned. Starting off with Airtel as one of its first customers, ACL Wireless now has most mobile service providers using its instant messaging application. ACL also provides instant messaging for companies in the finance industry, aviation, etc. “Most consumerfacing enterprises need to use such applications – airline companies need to reach consumers for alerts on flights, banks may need to inform customers about their balance,” says Goyal, adding “There wasn’t much of a market in the beginning and we were the first to come out with this application. But now the market has really taken off in a big way.”
- Sobha Menon |
