So you thought the printer market would take a hit as people get more environment conscious and go the e-route to save paper. Well, here is a reality check.
Tech major HP estimates that India will throw up a 120 billion page-opportunity in 2014. That's a 50 per cent growth from the 80 billion pages printed now.
“We are seeing a tremendous growth in India, even outpacing the growth rate in many other regions,” said Mr John Solomon, Senior Vice-President, Imaging and Printing Group, Asia Pacific and Japan, HP.
Multiple drivers
The optimism is based on multiple drivers: the low printer-to-PC ratio, explosive growth in content creation (from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes between 2010 and 2020), the rise in mobility and Web usage in India, and analogue-to-digital transformation. At present, a large portion of printing is skewed in favour of analogue or offset printing.
The increased focus on India market means that HP would inject more investments into tech innovation, expand its reach in smaller cities, and also scale up its managed print services offering by reaching out to more enterprises. HP will also work on printer apps to appeal specifically to the education segment. That work will be carried out at its Bangalore R&D centre, said Mr Solomon.
R&D centre
The India R&D centre has previously been involved in key technology innovation including development of ePrint centre and cloud services. It has also worked on software layers that are a part of the company's Managed Print Services offering.
HP expects its growth to be spread across different segments – consumers (including households where printer penetration is low), small and medium businesses, and enterprises. “People are buying smartphones…Our ‘ePrint' technology allows users to mail PDF and office documents to the printer, in order to take print outs,” he said.