Tales from the Road – A Week in India

I just returned from a week in India as part of the HP InfoTrends conference on production digital printing and packaging series we have been doing throughout the Asia Pacific region. The 2-day conference was front-ending the IPEX South Asia tradeshow held in Mumbai, India.

Like the previous HP InfoTrends conferences held in Singapore and Beijing, this event attracted a large audience of print service providers, marketing services providers, distributors, and HP partners. There were over 200 attendees and 20 speakers covering 10 sessions.

Alon bar-Shany, GM of HP Indigo, opened the event talking about the strategic importance of the AP region and growth of Indigo over the last few years. He noted that HP now has over 5,000 Indigo presses at 4,000 customer locations. Alon also shared that there are 300 HP 7000 devices in 25 countries and 1,800 HP 5X00 class digital presses in 74 countries including 200 multi-unit sites. 15% of Indigo business is related to photo applications and HP has experienced double digit world wide year-over-year page growth during the 1^st half of 2009 despite a difficult economy in the North America and EMEA regions.

I opened up the conference talking about the importance of understanding your client’s marketing objectives, how we live in a multi-channel world, and that printers need to go with an operations-driven or marketing services-driven strategy.

The keynote session also included outstanding perspectives from David Minnett, Managing Director of Group Momentum an Australian-based marketing service provider. David was followed by Sameer Bindra, President of BuzzIMC an integrated marketing communications service provider based in India. These companies really have their act together and have implemented sophisticated multi-channel, highly personalized marketing programs for a variety of major players in the auto, energy and retail industries and government sector.

Every session included presentations by technology vendors and customers on key topics including:

• Publishing Market Success Stories
• Enabling the Print On Demand Revolution with Web to Print
• Photo Market Opportunities in India
• Labels & Packaging Opportunities

Also participating was Eric Hawkinson, Executive Director of DSCOOP which announced its expansion the AP region back in May at the HP InfoTrends event in Beijing.

HP continues to make significant investments in market development activities around the globe. They have a strong distribution network throughout Asia including Redington India Limited. Conference attendees seemed very pleased with the program and excited about the digital print opportunities in India.

My overall observation is that India has a booming economy evidenced by construction going on everywhere including airports, mass transportation, commercial real estate, apartments, and manufacturing.

However, India is also coping with many of the problems of rapid growth including traffic, pollution, and a significant gap between the bottom levels of income and middle to upper classes. Despite these challenges, India is clearly on the move and experienced relatively mild effects from the global recession because of their large domestic economy.

Printers in India seem to have been a little slow to jump into the digital production press business, but now have growing interest. I believe there is a substantial opportunity not just for the equipment manufacturers but also for software vendors with web-to-print, variable data, transpromotional, and production workflow tools.

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