The Indian printer market has significantly grown over the last couple of years. The demand from home segment and office segment has accelerated the growth of this market. Moreover, the innovations in this space have played a crucial role which has benefited the market players to achieve sustainable growth. The momentum in the printer market is poised to create a healthy business environment where brands and channel partners expect good demand for printers. Epson is one of the leading market players catering to the market with its wide product range. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently interacted with Siva Kumar, Senior General Manager, Inkjet Printers, Epson India. Mr. Siva elaborated about the market landscape, their product offerings, service support and challenges in the market. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: How do you see positioning of Epson InkTank printers in Indian market?
Siva Kumar: We have been in the number one position in India for the last four or five years. We have sold over 5 million InkTank printers in India since the launch of InkTank printer in 2011 January. We are leading this market since last 10 years and we are number one market player in both Inktank & Inkjet market.
Rajeev: What are the key factors propelling the inkjet printer market growth in India?
Siva Kumar: This growth has mainly come from the first-time buyer of inkjet printers or for the learning purpose. Even work from home segment have shown more interest in the InkTank printers. The overall inkjet market has grown in FY20 as compared to FY19. These trends will continue to drive the InkTank market further in current FY as well. Now the demand for ink cartridges has been fine. As per the Q1 2021 market report, we captured 50.85% market share in the overall inkJet market space.
Rajeev: What are the key channel strategies for upcoming festive season?
Siva Kumar: We are very much looking forward the upcoming festive season. We told our first-tier partner to work on width-building across their geographical locations to enusre Epson printers’ availability across the country. We know the major buyers during this festival season are going to be the home segments. The focus is given more on entry level multifunction printers and the WiFi multifunction printers. We focus on these two models to secure high enough inventory at all our channel partners to gain the festival season market share. Secondly, Digital connectivity is very simple to connect with many people at their convenience so we are continuously keeping in touch with our channel partners and understanding their all requirements including availability of stock. All these are carried out by our sales people across the country and the fulfillment happens between the first tier partner to the second tier partner. Thirdly, we continually give tools to our channel partners to push to the end customer.
Rajeev: Is there any plan to add more partners in certain areas or regions?
Siva Kumar: We don’t have a fixed plan to appoint new partners. However, we have 4000 registered retail outlets spread across India. In FY’19 we used to have schemes so that the registered partners get into the schemes to achieve any of the slabs. But now there are no schemes. Those that used to sell one unit in a month also are buying directly from our first tier partner. So we were able to spread throughout the channel without any fixed number to achieve. In the recent sell out report we got from the first tier partner is that the number of channel partners have gone up from 3000 to 4000. So the additional 1000 partners have boarded on their own. This has given the advantage to Epson to spread across more channel partners.
Rajeev: How do you balance between traditional partners and online sellers who sell your products?
Siva Kumar: We support organic growth. We do not push from our end to get more market share from the online channel. So whatever organic growth is happening online that we are able to fulfill. There is no special push from our end to increase sales. The first preference is given to traditional channel partners because each and every channel partner speaks about the product well to the customers face to face. When it comes to customers, they already do a lot of homework to identify the right product to purchase. They go through the reviews and they check popular models offline. So offline majorly supports the popularity of the product. We support the offline channel at the same level as before online. For online we are not restricting the convenience of what customers are getting. We allow organic growth to happen online for Epson products but we continue to support our offline channel at the most.
Rajeev: How have you managed to offer good service support to your customers?
Siva Kumar: Epson is very much committed to provide best service support to our loyal customers. We have about 450 service centers across the country to handle any such service queries. Even during existing pandemic, we were able to manage well because we have very wide & strong service network across all region. The engineer does not have to travel a long way to attend the call. All the products from entry level CISS to high end products give constant service support. Based on the restriction on that particular location we are able handle the queries very well with our well trained technical team.
Rajeev: What is your message to your retailers who wants to sell Epson products?
Siva Kumar: Please be safe during this pandemic situation. It is not completely over, it is coming down but still you need to keep safe. Secondly, we have 56 models in the ink tank category. People are thinking only the entry level can be pushed to the home segment. We have L4160 and L4150 models so my advice to those partners is to focus on the complete basket of products and position the right kind of product to the customer instead of waiting for the entry level to come in.
