HP expects India to boost revenues

Hewlett-Packard, which is targeting a 10 per cent growth for its $20 billion imaging and printing group division, expects India to clock the highest growth rate in the coming years.

Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice-president, imaging and printing group, said, "Though globally we expect an addition of around $2 billion to our revenue due to our expected growth of around 10 per cent, we expect Asia-Pacific to grow at a higher rate with India posting the highest rate of growth."

HP, which had the largest consumer product rollout in its history in 2002, is now embarking on a new strategy, which is a distinct shift from targeting "consumers" to targeting "businesses".

"The objective is to improve productivity, reduce costs, accelerate decision making processes and increase marketing effectiveness for our customers. We hope to put forth a proposition in which they see value and by which we can optimise the customers imaging and printing environment to improve their return on IT," Joshi added.

The company is focusing on digital imaging market and has planned to introduce more than 50 new imaging and printing products within the next few months The company intends to sustain its double digit growth through core, emerging and new businesses in a plan spread across the next four years.

While the initial focus being on the low end, in the subsequent years the focus would be on the digital imaging, convergence and digital publishing space.

"HP's continued growth and leadership in the printing industry will be fuelled by these ongoing priorities as well as upcoming innovations such as in commercial services, digital imaging and digital publishing - strategies that are not easily overcome by other companies," Joshi said.

Earlier, Tarunjeet Sarao, country category manager of shared printing and connectivity, imaging and printing group, had told mediapersons in Kolkata while launching the company's new age products, that the company would focus on application and solution based printers and imaging products that are meant for mobile professionals, small and medium businesses to the large enterprise businesses.

He added that according to IDC estimate the I&P business should grow by 18-20 per cent. In laser printers, HP has 84.3 per cent market share, 79 per cent share in inkjet, 90 per cent in large format and 60 per cent in graphic art.

Overall HP has market share of 75 per cent in India. HP earned revenue of $36 million from I&P business in India for the financial year ending October 31, 2001.

Sarao informed that the new age products were being imported from Singapore. In the last year, company sold 1,20,000 units of laser printer, 40,000 multifunctional products and 3,60,000 inkjet printers.

He admitted that Samsung has made strong foray in the low price point printing segment. He claimed the competition was helping the market grow.

"However, with these launches we first broke the price barrier for laser color printer by making them available below Rs 75,000. Color can make lot of difference to the business and people are increasingly finding innovative ways to boost their business by using color printing solutions," Sarao said.

Later Sarao also informed that HP would launch digital camera in India. HP is presently the third largest in digital camera in the US.