It's been a decade since tape cassettes have done significant business for music labels. In that decade, the explosion of digital music has meant that cassette decks and physical music were pretty much dead. So when Saregama launched a physical music player in 2017, it had been a long time since they had any significant direct relationship with individual customers. As it turned out, those customers were more than enthusiastic about Carvaan, the music player that catapulted Saregama back into retail. Carvaan comes pre-loaded with 5,000 songs from the pre-Internet era, and its sales show that there is tremendous nostalgia that Saregama was able to tap into. The company has made the device available in Bengali, Tamil and Marathi, on top of the Hindi original. "Electronics business is not something that came [naturally] to a B2B company," said Vikram Mehra, Saregama's Managing Director. "So we took it slow to maintain quality, we took it slow to build our pipelines, we took it slow so that we can build the distribution network properly and at the end when we are finishing the year I think we are very satisfied with the way in which Carvaan numbers have grown." The numbers Saregama has four manufacturers making Carvaan, the latest one being Indian. Here's how many units they sold each quarter, including other variants like Carvaan Mini: Quarter Units sold Gross margin Q1 FY 2017–18 14,000 17% Q2 FY 2017–18 95,000 19% Q3 FY 2017–18 132,000 20% Q4 FY 2017–18 146,000 22% Total…
