With the assortment of products that address the entire spectrum of market from home, SoHo to the professionals, enterprises and government, the company has touched Rs.1300 crore mark in this FY and replaced a significant portion of laser printers from the market with its ink tank printers.
Epson is always considered to be the underdog in the space of printing solutions market. Whenever people think of printing Epson comes as later but HP, Xerox and Canon as first, however the tag has helped the company to gain good grounds without much of aggressive strategy from the competition. Very quietly the company has plugged the gaps in the market with some very good products over the years. Today the company has followed its compatriot company – Canon India in terms of technologies and outpaced in some areas too and is all on its way to cross Rs.1300 crore turnover this year from Rs.1078 crore last year.
Epson has evolved its product ranges. Today along with its normal inkjet printers range there would be similar number of ink tank printers as well in the portfolio of Epson. This has helped the company to address the entire spectrum of market, which was not possible earlier.
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“We are able to acquire in excess of 5% of the entry mono laser space as customers are shifting into the Ink tank printers.”
Samba Moorthy
Vice President
Sales and Marketing
Epson India.
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Samba Moorthy, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Epson India, says, “We are seeing traction not only from the SOHO and enterprise market but also in home users for ink tank printers. This is an area where we are seeing a big increase. Till recent past, in government sectors, all the users had been using only laser; that an area where we have been able to crack with our Ink tank printers.”
“I will say that the growth has been from the inkjet printers – primarily from the Ink tank side by moving into both home and corporate space. To provide a data points, we are able to acquire in excess of 5% of the entry mono laser space as customers are shifting into the Ink tank printers,” he added.
The other factor, we have been noticing among the consumers is that printing in color is increasing. And Epson could see a growth of 3 – 4 – fold growth in their color printer portfolio.
Samba Moorthy added, “The primary reason why we’ve seen that color printing has increased largely because of the color advantage that customers get from our ink tank printer. We are able to provide the color printout at 28 paisa per page.”
The company has also introduced the heavy duty printers with replicable ink pack. Customers can easily print around 75000 pages a month in color or mono. This is able to provide a copy of 30 paisa for the mono and 70 paisa for color and this is able to replace some of the heavy duty copier machines in the market and even the commercial copier market is adopting this family of machine. This is where Epson is hoping to get great traction in the market as well.
As per Samba Moorthy, in the past years, most of the commercial users have been using Epson printers for the commercial printing also so there is point why the customers would not use these heavy duty machines from Epson for their commercial use. The customers are pretty satisfied with the quality and ruggedness of these printers and it is beyond doubt why they should not replace their high priced laser printers with these new generation ink pack printers. Particularly in the rural market where there is always a chance of power deficiency, these printers can help because these printers can run using as less as 30 watts. In a comparative matrix the overall acquisition cost of laser copier is the price of the copier machine and the price of running cost of power, which is always at the much higher side.
Giving an astounding revelation, Samba Moorthy added, “These printers so less power consuming that the user can buy a 300 VA battery and run these machines, which is as easy as that. And the copier centers have started adopting these machines as an option. Therefore, the market share for the ink tank printers are growing and able to eat 5% of the entry level laser printer market share.”
Finally, the ink tank printer market is pegged to be 1, 325, 000 as volume in 2015 and it is believed to grow at 5-7 per cent year on year in next three years. similarly, the laser market size is around 1500,000 and in last 12-18 months’ time Epson is able to notch 5% of the entry level laser market. And as per Samba Moorthy, the company is optimistic to convert 20% of laser inkjet market to inkjet market in 24-76 months.
