Anything But A Photocopier

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Dell Q3 profit dips 54 per centRIL shareholders approve 1:1 bonus issueIndian Billionaires’ wealth records 90% increase: ...

: What does a brand do when the category it so steadfastly represents; its raison d’etre is all but gone and it is haunted by ghosts of the past—say a 2002 investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for misreporting earnings to the tune of $1.5 billion, although that happened a long time ago and did not concern the Indian outfit, directly?

To exorcise those ghosts and more, you do what Xerox India, a 100% subsidiary of Fortune 500 company Xerox Corp, is doing—up-sell yourself from a photocopier (a dying technology) to an end-to-end document manager focused primarily on the enterprise market, given that the cost-sensitive small and medium business (SMB) sector is already with competition HP and Canon.

Sounds ambitious? You could say that, except that when you begin to look at the way digital printing market has been shaping up in India, you realise that nearly two-thirds of Xerox’s equipment revenue (the company refuses to divulge exact figures) is currently coming from products and technologies that were introduced in India in just the past two years. A case in point is Xerox’s flagship iGen3, a hi-definition digital press that is capable of outputting over 10 lakh impressions per month, at a speed of 6,600 four colour A4 impressions per hour. The result? Shorter print runs and higher productivity for digital print professionals.

“Even in the case of low-end products, a sizeable chunk of our revenue is coming from technologies that were launched 12 to 18 months ago,” reveals Vipin Tuteja, executive director, Production Systems Group (PSG), and head, integrated marketing, and SAO (South Asian Organisations), Xerox India.

Globally, the company introduced a 100-odd products in three years and doubled the global R&D spend on software and services in 2008—under a new business group called Xerox Global Services (XGS)—from 2%-3% a decade ago to the present 4%-6%. Experts contend that it was the low spend on technology that was primarily responsible for Xerox’s complete decimation in the category.