2014 overview and Trends for 2015 by Mr. Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations, Xerox India
The printing industry in India is growing at a rate of 12% per annum and comprises of over 2,50,000 big, small and medium printers. Supporting this is the package printing sector, which is growing at the annual rate of 17 percent, commercial printing at a rate of 10-12 percent and digital printing at robust 30 percent. The digital printing industry especially is seeing significant transformation with new technologies & innovative applications providing cost-effective and customized solutions. Bill printing will make further use of digital printers to bring in advt. in single page as that of bill to have customer recall and help in elimination of additional flyers, which normally customer don’t see except the bill page. In the near future, we believe that offset and digital will not only co-exist, but will also complement each other- with offset taking the medium-to-longer jobs and digital performing on short-to-medium run lengths; there is a renewed interest on short end printing because of merging of variable and fixed data. Due to the increasing demand by customers for personalization, UV digital printing and inkjet technology are on the rise in India with swelling focus on segments like photo-printing, book publishing and packaged printing. Digital printing on packaging material will take big momentum in coming years through high end digital products which can handle up to 500 GSM paper.
Another visible trend is the shift in the printing industry in India to a more solution-centric business model from a purely equipment dependent industry. This has prompted printing majors in the country to develop more applications and to further the use of various software and technologies to automate and simplify business processes. Moving into 2015, providing simplified solutions, ease of operations, cost optimization and savings to customers will only get stronger; largely due to the uptake in cloud printing, mobile printing and increase in remote connectivity and automation of processes.
By 2015, there will be more than 40 vendors with commercially available managed services offerings leveraging smart machines and industrialized services. With consumers’ preference to use Internet and mobile services to drive business efficiencies and optimize time management, every industry is striving to improve the customer experience by simplifying, automating and making more intelligent end-to-end processes, minimizing manual interventions and allowing the consumer to self-serve.
