Aiming for Rs 1,200 crore in revenue from India this year, Canon India expects its printer division to touch Rs 450 crore in revenue by the year-end ? registering a growth of 60%. Alok Bharadwaj, senior vice-president, Canon India, discusses with FE?s Diksha Dutta the company’s focus areas, challenges and strategies for the printer division:

What is your revenue from SMEs, the government and the consumer segment in printers?

The biggest printer market for us are small and medium enterprises (SMEs), contributing 40 % to the business. Nearly 25 % comes from the government ? directly or indirectly. The consumer segment gets us 15% business, because homes are typically not for laser printers but they engage in photo printing or school summer projects . The balance is spread on to large enterprises.

So, large enterprises drive least revenue for you…..

Large enterprises are weak for us. Large enterprises have huge business requirement in their every purchase. They do not buy printers, but print millions of pages a day. So, there is big business opportunity with them. In our case, we do not have large enterprises, so our printing is less. Although we have become the market leaders and sold more number of printers ? we have not done more printing like HP.

To turn the tables, its important that we tie-up with large corporations. The central part of our comapny?s strategy is to penetrate into corporations to do more printing rather than selling.

What are the key areas in the government sector?

We are betting big on the segments of education, healthcare and e-governance– in terms of verticals. The government works with few large system integrators and we are betting very big with some of them like Wipro, TCS, Educomp and HCL. The government signs up with system integrators and they in-turn need our products to deploy them in government projects.

What are your initiatives in green technology?

Our new products are now consuming less energy, standby mode is getting better. Duplex printing is a big way to save environment, because you print on both the sides. The environment ministry has now announced a proposed act on e-waste. Canon is working very closely with them, so the act actually comes out. We are offering suggestions on how to address this problem.

What is the growth in the printer business and what are your targets?

The printer division earned Rs 282 crore last year. We expect it to touch Rs 450 crore this year, signifying 60 % growth. The first five months have been encouraging with 95% growth in the printer division- top line.

Our market share is increasing. In April, May and June?according to Gartner, our market share in laser printer multi-function device space has gone up to 34.4 %. This is 0.1% higher than HP, which gives us confidence. Our range of products has expanded to 82 this year. Moreover, 37% of total division is printers. This makes the printer division our biggest division, by far.