MUMBAI, INDIA: A new revolution in the digital photography market was unveiled when Hewlett Packard brought forth its retail photo printing plans with HP Retail Photo Solutions. The company also declared the much-expected launch of
HP Snapfish that is customized mainly for the Indian markets.
On the occasion,
V Narayanan, director- Retail Photo Solutions, IPG, Hewlett Packard APJ, spoke to
Prasad Ramasubramanian of
CyberMedia News. Excerpts from the interview:
CMN: What was the rationale behind Hewlett Packard (HP) entering into this business?
V Narayanan: There are quite a few market trends in digital photography and in the coming years we believe that the consumer photography is going to be revolutionized.
Digital photography especially in the prints are about 43 billion (the number of photographs clicked) but the ones that are actually getting printed or the ones that were shares and saved were very small — about 8 billion. Now, this number would be doubling in the next three years and that's an exciting opportunity for us to be in this space. If you notice, whenever you had a film earlier — can you count how many photographs used to be taken (maybe 5-10 rolls) but now ---- with digitalization taking place — look at the amount of photographs being taken. The numbers have increased significantly. HP is a leader in digital technology and that's why we are in this business.
CMN: What are the opportunities you foresee in a market like India?
VN: See, with the announcement of HP Retail Photo Solution in our country, we are hoping to give a profitable business proposition for the retailers by driving down costs and offering their customers more choice, improved flexibility, better quality and price. Also, in India if you go through the Gartner report which states that the market size in India for digital camera would be surging at 20-22 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2011. Also, the number of mobile users in our country would be doubling during the next half a decade, from 185 million to 462 million in 2011.
