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VP Sajeevan, Director-Consumer
System Products, Canon India
Targeting youth of
this country will be a major part of our go-to-market strategy,
especially in the B, C and D-class cities. The products on which we
will be focusing on, in these cities would be laser, inkjet and
all-in-ones, and in the metros we plan to focus on Wi-Fi enabled
printers. Other than this, the company also plans to focus on
establishing original inkjet centers in the A, B, C and D-class
cities where people can buy cartridges at a reasonable price. So,
consumables like this will also be in Canon's radar.
According to the
latest Q3 figures, Canon is the #1 in
printers'
segment-lasers, scanners and multifunctions with
marketshare of 39, 48 and 32 percent respectively. We are only behind
in the inkjet printers segment. By the end of this year we are aiming
to increase the marketshare by10 percent in this segment. As far as
multifunction devices in the inkjet segment are concerned, we see
convergence happening as the cost between the two is narrowing down
everyday. But in the laser segment, I think otherwise, as there is
still a substantial difference between the prices of the two. May be
in times to come it will happen but as of now it is not happening.
Canon has always
supported the 'green' cause. Almost all Canon products in the market
are pro-green. We have the best power savers to give a fair edge to
our products. If you talk about numbers, Canon's products consume
40 percent less energy in comparison to others. As a responsible
organization, our policies have always been environment-friendly and
we will continue to work on products to make it greener.
Canon has big
plans for the year 2010. We are already working on the new concept
Canon Image Express to penetrate into the small cities. This
initiative is targeted at the youths and will kick-start in the first
week of April. Since we want to consolidate our position in the
market, we will choose 40 exclusive Canon partners in non-metro
cities of India as well to sell printers, scanners and
multifunctions.
SM Ramprasad, Senior Business
Manager-CPG, Epson
In a broad
classification, Epson is into retail and power solutions, and works
closely with ISVs, SIs and OEMs. The peripherals market is also doing
pretty well. Since our portfolio consists of different verticals, we
also cater to educational and government projects.
'Solution-based'
is the need of the hour. Partners have started buying screens, doing
modifications and covering civil works. Lots of partners are moving
from reselling to solutions. This trend is slowly picking up. We ask
partners to come out of their closed approach and use cross selling
and upselling techniques. If a partner is selling dot matrix
printers, we ask him to up sell, since he should understand the
customer's requirement. In the IT industry there are a lot of
partners who sell low-pitched products are low prices for the fear of
losing customers. Instead, partners should approach customers to sell
them their required solutions, to get better RoI. This would be
benefit partners, customers and vendors.
We have 180 WeP
partners and 4000 Epson certified partners across the country. Our
primary focus is to continue with our aggressive growth plans. We are
also focusing on providing more solution selling than product
selling. For this, we look to initiate partners who are into
integration of peripherals. Small SI's for the corporate sector,
and SME & SOHO for office automation.
We talk about
cross selling and upselling techniques and advantages. We are
providing customers with our virtual demo centers to give them a feel
of our products. This is given to partners in a flash drive. Using
this the partner can showcase better products without any extra
investment or expansion. The Customer gets opportunity to use better
products. We advise partners to show customers the available products
and start from top to bottom. For this we collate lot of information
and provide corporate training. Our stock planning is also improved a
lot this year. Without expansion or investment, partners can increase
revenue through upselling and cross selling.
KP Ranjan,
Country Manager-Lexmark, India
The growth is
positive in the laser and all-in-one (AiO) inkjet printer segments,
as per the latest IDC and Gartner reports. For Lexmark the focus is
on Inkjet AiOs and laser printers. Lexmark's strategy is to primarily
focus on the SMB and enterprise segments. We are hiring more people
in various parts of the country and revamping the partner portal. The
focus is to have more corporate resellers and system integrators
selling Lexmark solutions to end-customers. We expect to add 300 such
partners this year to fuel our growth.
Lexmark has more than 67
products in the market. More than 50 percent of them are
multifunction devices (MFDs). Hence, the growth of MFD has helped us
to grow too. The MFD numbers are likely to grow much faster in the A4
range. To better this, Lexmark is launching a new MFD, which will
offer higher speed, better productivity, efficient products and a
more competitive TCO. The advantage of an A4 MFD is that it consumes
50 percent power that of a low need A3 MFD.
Green is the 'in
thing' for now. In a printer life cycle, almost 80 percent of the
carbon footprint is due to paper. Hence it is very important that
printing vendors work on reducing paper. We, at Lexmark, have taken
this up from 2007, and have been going to customers with our 'Print
Less Save More' strategy. This strategy is three-fold. The first is
to sell only duplex printers, which will force people to use both
sides of papers. Second is to introduce user-wise accounting quota,
which discourages wasteful printing. The third strategy is to
integrate MFDs, which will increase work flow management and create a
better document management system.
Bhalchandra Nikumb, Head-Sales and
Channel Management, Commercial Business, Kodak India
Within India,
Kodak deals with two major areas that is the prepaid solution and the
digital printing solution. The company also manages the document
manage image solutions where it sells document scanners and related
software. So in India these are the major three blocks which we are
currently concentrating on. In order to expand business and increase
productivity of the customers we offer a wide range of products and
solutions in printers like the Inkjet digital printing, production of
black and white systems and the digital color presses.
Kodak deals with a
large portfolio, including a wide range of products in its own
particular area so it is difficult to define the size of the market
in terms of number or comment on the same. As far as Kodak is
concerned we are growing at a pace which is much faster than the
market growth in terms of digital growth.
In the digital
printing area we compete with players like Xerox, HP Scanner, Ricoh,
Konika Minolta. While in the case of the prepaid conventional area
digital, we deal with players like the TechNova. And as far as
document imaging, we compete with the players like Fujitsu, Canon,
HP. The major two product groups that we are talking about consist of
most big and small channel partners together barring the small
resellers almost 40-50 channels in India. But in terms of large
channels they will be around 15. Comparatively the mid-size market
consists of 50 channel partners. In terms of small resellers the
number is 200-300 in India. We definitely keep adding regular channel
partners. It adds to the business growth as we bring new products. So
that is a continuation process and we always look for new channels,
good channels. Kodak also recently announced its association with
Nikon as its channel partner for distribution, sales and services of
its Prepress solutions which includes the CTP equipment, related work
flow and consumables.
The automation
which is required by the industry in one area where many companies
are looking up to us to provide the application solutions. The second
area wherein people look at us is that the industry is moving from
conventional printing to digital printing. Customers look at us
because the products are unique and give good value. Thus, people in
the area of digital printing are looking at Kodak, for strong
workload. Another area where Kodak is pretty strong is the packaging
area. In the packaging segment we are also coming out with the new
solutions which I cannot disclose now. So I believe this is another
growth drive for us.
Anand Kumar, GM-Printing
Solutions, Brother India
Brother India plans to consolidate the
channel base in order to tap the burgeoning market in India. With a
product range that includes laser AiOs (all-in-one), inkjet AiOs;
standalone laser printers and fax machines as well as labeling
solutions, we are targeting an estimated addressable market of around
1.7 million units. We are quite bullish about the growth expected
therein. Within the AiOs segment, we expect the inkjet category to
grow by around 10 percent while the laser category will gain by 20
percent or so. As far as mono laser printers are concerned, we see
the market growing at 15 percent. One market which is vast is the
labeling solutions market wherein we expect more than 50 percent
growth. While Brother has the third highest marketshare in the laser
printers segment, it is at the fourth position when it comes to
inkjet AiOs. We are the market leader in the laminated label printer
category within labeling.
The overall GDP growth of the country
has led to higher PC penetration both for SOHO as well as corporate
customers and this has boosted the growth of printers as a whole.
e-Governance initiatives are also driving the market forward with a
lot of state government initiatives like e-Seva, CSC projects and
Sarva Siksha Abhyan as well as central government projects like
e-filing, e-returns, unique identity project making it mandatory for
public institutions to computerize. Another major vertical is BFSI
where the implementation of core banking systems requires the
digitization of documents which drives the growth of AiOs which not
only has the capability to print but to also scan documents when
required. Education is another vertical where we are seeing good
traction due to the computerization happening there leading to
greater demand for printing solutions. On the other hand, one of the
biggest inhibitor remains the high indirect tax structure. Due to
high rate of tax levied on these products, it makes the product
costlier and this acts like a dampener for potential sales. For
instance, apart from customs duty, CVD (counter veiling duty) and SAD
(special additional duty), Octroi duties are levied. Without these
duties, the overall price comes down by around 15-20 percent.
Ours is a two-tier distribution model
wherein the top tier comprises of three national distributors namely
Ingram Micro, Neoteric and Lipi Data. At the lower level, we have a
channel partner base of around 500 dealers along with a number of SI
partners through whom we target government projects. We also sell
through large format retail stores like Croma and others. In August
last year, we had introduced a program called 'Brother Channel One'
or 'BC1' in short, the purpose of which was to develop quality
partners, help grow their business as well as formally recognize
consistent and loyal partners. Currently we have around 140 BC1
partners who get access to many exclusive benefits. The plan is to
consolidate and develop this base for the future.
Last year, we introduced the policy of
selling more of 'step up models' across all categories. For instance,
in the inkjet AiO segment, we launched the unique A3 model while in
the laser segment, we came out with a 'wireless ready' entry-level
printer which is again unique to Brother. With this approach our
partners are able to target a wider customer base where many other
vendors do not have a product presence. We plan to provide more of
such products as well as training inputs to our partners so that the
benefits of these unique models can be effectively communicated to
the end customer.
Finally, when 'going green' is the
mantra for many vendors, we too plan to follow suit. Our philosophy
is to follow the 5R (respect, rethink, reduce, recycle, reuse)
principle and we are in the process of rolling out a green
initiative, the details of which are still on the drawing board.
Vipin Tuteja, ED-Marketing and
Business Support, Xerox India
The Indian digital printing industry
has experienced a very good growth rate in the last few years and we
hope this growth momentum to continue in the year 2010 also.While the
print industry is growing at about 12.2 percent, digital print is
growing almost at about 25 percent, double that of the overall
printing industry growth.
Some of Xerox's new technological
innovations and emerging technologies that will reduce cost and
increase turnaround time for digital printers, enabling them to offer
better value to their customers include, Xerox iGen4 Press and
DocuColor 7002. Some additional features in these products include,
new low gloss toner, which produces a smooth matte finish; automated
color workflow, giving print providers higher levels of productivity;
in-line spectrophotometer, which measures test patches that provide
data on the press performance to Xerox's Automated Color Quality
Suite which automates previous manual tasks such as system
calibration and spot color matching and expanded in-line finishing
options.
Xerox has been a pioneer in bringing
innovative technology solutions to the Indian market to accelerate
the growth of digital printing industry and will continue to do so in
the future also.We have identified Real Business Live! as this year's
theme for Xerox , under which we will look at providing real
solutions to real business challenges of our partners and customers.
At IPEX 09, we had showcased Real Business Live! Development tools
that generated significant interest within our partners and
customers.
Innovation is the key to the success of
modern business practice. Xerox believes in innovations that are
customer centric as well as environmentally sustainable. The
technologies that are being developed in Xerox and that are embedded
in all the Xerox offerings are environment friendly. All our products
consume lesser energy than industry norms for that particular
product. Xerox has always taken initiatives both within the
organization as well as the products that we produce to implement
best technology that is environment friendly. Each technology should
have a competitive edge and one of the biggest areas where green
energy enables customers and vendors alike is energy conservation.
The future is green technology and green products.
Uday Bhat, GM-Printing Business,
Samsung India
Having met with success in the B2B and
Disti channel in 2009, our 2010 strategy is to further strengthen the
distributor channel for entry-level products in top markets as well
as expand in tier-3 and 4 towns to better cater to SOHO and SMB
segment. We will also leverage the SMB segment with new product range
and solutions, offering stronger value proposition to customers.
Another thing we want to do is to grow the B2B business by focusing
on large corporates and offer them 'Value for Money' printing
solutions.
In the single function printers
segment, our marketshare was 20 percent in 2009 and around 29-30
percent in the multifunction segment. The total marketshare in the
printers segment was around 23 percent from January to December 2009.
This year Samsung intends to increase its marketshare to a level of
around 30 percent. The overall market for printers is expected to
grow by 15 percent in 2010, with multifunction definitely growing at
a faster rate. At Samsung we are equipped to handle any change in
trend in the market, so we are offering a complete range of
multifunction printers. The company plans to further enhance this
range all through the year.
Most of the products we make here at
Samsung are eco-friendly and have an energy star rating. According to
our estimate, the printer market is expected to grow by one million
units comprising both single and multifunction devices in the A4-size
category.
Ramdinsanga Saiawi, Head-Marketing,
WeP Peripherals
Primarily, WeP is divided into three
segments-IT printers, power solutions and retail printers. India is
home to lot of retail outlets, which serves as a huge market base for
the retail printers. We are primarily focusing on automating our
business completely.
For retail printing we are targeting
mid-level retail outlets. Usually when one talks about retail, they
are hinting at top retail players. However, we are targeting the next
layer in that section, which is very large in India. We already have
a lot of focus in tier-2 cities like Mysore, Pune, Hubli,Cochin,
Thiruvananthapuram and Coimbatore. We plan to sell retail printers
only through the channel. As our product caters to a very niche
market and it is still being developed, we are yet to appoint any
channel partners for the same. However, in the next year, we will
definitely look at the channel space with renewed interest.
Right now, our main focus is on
complete business automation. Consumers in tier-2 cities are a little
hesitant to invest in this product. Therefore, it becomes our
responsibility to keep up the trust and retain customers. I feel that
with constant innovation and by addressing our customer requirements,
we can definitely achieve consistent growth in the retail printing
division.