Printing industry in India has seen lot of transformation in last one year. We have seen adoption of MFPs has grown tremendously as compared to other categories. The players have already geared up to tap the enormous opportunity through other form of services as well. Xerox India, one of the leading vendor has already made their aggressive stand by launching many more innovative products and solution in India. Mr. Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations, Xerox India Shares Company’s current market strategy and upcoming channel plans in an exclusive interview with DT. Excerpts of the interview...
A:The Indian printing industry is increasingly being driven by growth in. As its growth trends continue to be well over the world averages, in print volume terms, India is set to become the fifth largest market by 2018 moving up five notches from its present tenth slot.
Going green is the way to go- Any print company that establishes greener practices get an edge over the competition. This could mean participating in a recycling drive, offering digital storage of materials to be printed or using more eco-friendly materials in the printing process, to name a few. Print can really continue to exist and thrive in this growing digital world. However, it takes clever planning and the ability to go with the flow to stay afloat.
Print on Demand - Advances in digital printing technology now allow customers to have their soft copies saved for editing and printing later. Customers find that print on demand makes more sense because having many printed copies occupying space for a long period of time is not really that reasonable. The trend has now shifted from distribute and print to print and distribute.
A:Multifunction printers are growing aggressively, both in the market and for us. Multifunctional devices edges over single function devices with increased adoption by small, medium size businesses as well as large enterprises. The other primary factors leading to MFP adoption are higher level of efficiency, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), high quality prints, ease of use and value the MFPs offer. Also, it is important to understand that both inkjet and laser printers cater to specific needs of the customer. As a result, both inkjet and laser printing market will co-exist. Saying that, there is certainly a shift towards using laser printers.
A:Xerox has always been at the forefront of innovation and a pioneer in the printing industry and. Today, Xerox has moved beyond traditional printing to offer services like Managed Print Services, Document Management Solutions and much more. We have transformed to become a services led technology company.In India, our focus continues to be on the printing business and we are the only company to have a range of products starting from Rs. 16000 up till Rs. 25,00,00,000. We are present in every category of the printing market today. We have a long lasting relation with our customers because of the quality and efficiency our products provide, 60% of our customers are repeat customers. With a strong portfolio of products for the digital printing industry, we continue to maintain a market share well above 35% and we are constantly looking to innovate and add new capabilities to our devices which will help our customers optimize and simplify workflow processes.
A:As I indicated before, all our products have seen a good response from the market. Our recently launched products like Versant 2100 and Color C60/70 have especially been appreciated by customers and we have already hit double digit installations for these devices. We have also launched a few other devices like Versant 80 and 1000i which promise to offer true value to our customers. We have a slew of devices set to be launched and we are sure that they too will receive a good response from the market.
A:Our go to market strategy has always been through our channel partners and we are constantly training them to make sure they are well equipped and ready to go and tap the market aggressively. We are also equipping our partners to provide managed print services to the small and medium enterprises and we believe that this will further open up new avenues for our partners. We presently have more than 200 channel partners spread across the country.We have now unveiled Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS), a unique program which will help our partners to deliver Managed Print Services to our customers. We are training select top channel partners to be able to deliver these solutions and are sure that this will excite both our channel partners and our customers.
A:We work with two national distributors Neoteric and Global. Additionally, our channel partners are spread across the country and can cater to demand as per customers’ needs.We presently have more than 200 channel partners working with us.
A:Xerox has a centralized call center for all direct customer contract, which is a standalone call center for solving customer’s breakdown calls/ queries. It caters to the entire production range, high-end A3 office product space along with warranty management for A4 office devices. Also, Xerox has an innovative system, which directly links customers to the engineers, who can then address the issues the customer is facing. Through this system, within a few minutes of the customer’s call, the engineer gets an SMS regarding the customer’s details as well as the problem. Xerox aligns its field workforce in such a way that the customers are mapped to a specific engineer who knows the operations and the fleet of this customer very well. This helps to build a long-term relationship with the customer and improve overall machine performance with improved uptime.
A:We brought in a new line of business last year, launchinga range of Xerox laser cartridges for HP and Canon A4 printers. For rapid penetration and easy availability of these products across the country, we entered into an exclusive partnership with Flipkart, the largest e-commerce platform in India. These cartridges are available both with Flipkart and our channel partners.
