Princy Bhatnagar, Market Development Manager (Consumer Peripherals), HP India

Recently HP India announced strategic price cuts of upto 30

percent on DeskJet models 630C, 840C and 930C, compelling Epson to cut the price

of Stylus 480 and Stylus 680. Interestingly, although HP formally announced the

price cuts only now, these prices have been applicable in the market since

February when it started offering these models at the lower price through

various channel programs.

And the man behind this aggressive move is Princy Bhatnagar,

who took over as the Market Development Manager (Consumer Peripherals) of HP

India last year. "This move," he revealed, "was mainly aimed at

capturing additional market share." And the move paid off and paid off

well, as the company was able to clock sales of almost 7,000 units of DJ 840C in

February and an equal number in March. This was as compared to just about 4,000

units per month that it was able to sell earlier.

In March, pursuing the same aggressive positioning, he

unveiled a printer for the festive season of Holi in shades of gray and blue.

The 850c Plus printer was made available at Rs 8,499 and came bundled with a set

of 17 CDs containing 2.5 lakh cliparts. Available only during the month of

March, the printer got great response from the dealer community with March sales

registering a 40 percent increase as compared to January. This scheme was a

clever strategy from HP since post-budget, the market experienced sluggishness

during the month of March.

What Bhatnagar wanted to do was to reach the level of 50,000

units of inkjets per month-at that time HP was doing about 20,000 units of

inkjets a month-by JFM of though he admits “it was not a difficult number to

achieve since the company had been doubling its growth rate for the past three

years”.

Prior to taking up the consumer peripheral business,

Bhatnagar was looking after the Information Storage Group. Overall, he has been

with HP India for a little over three years now.

Before joining HP, Bhatnagar worked with PCL in its product

development team. He holds a Bachelors degree in engineering with specialization

in computer science from MS University, Baroda.