Cartridge market: from unorganized to organized

Prasad Ramasubramanian

MUMBAI: Not long back, most of us had to replace our ink cartridges once it was over, as they couldn’t get refilled. Interestingly, the printer-makers made their money more by selling the cartridges than by selling the printers itself.

That era also witnessed homegrown vendors undertaking refills that only resulted in inferior class of printouts. The undue advantage was also taken because of users being unaware of what they could get from their cartridge.

However, associations such as CRTAI (Cartridge Recyclers and Traders Association of India), ICRRA (Indian Cartridge Remanufactures and Recyclers Association) have been formulated to provide a knowledge sharing platform that would in turn ensure better quality of output for the end customer.

Puneet Chadha, director, Supplies, Hewlett-Packard India, said, “70 per cent of the technology of a printer is inside the cartridge.”

His candid admission gains a lot of weight considering the emphasis laid on the quality of cartridges by manufacturers such Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Cartridge World.

Today, printing costs have decreased significantly on one hand and the performance has shot up astronomically both in imaging and in the printing space. India, however, continues to be ruled by unorganized segment.

While industry analysts agree that Indian markets are highly un-organized and HP has taken a step ahead to show how its Inkjet Print Cartridges are more efficient than the refilled and remanufactured ones. This is seen as a step to educate the customer on the do’s and don’ts in this domain. HP roped in TUV SUD PSB to conduct a study in the Asia Pacific Region, where the non-originals market was prevalent.

The study was conducted to primarily evaluate the page yield and reliability of HP branded cartridges vis-à-vis 14 other brands belonging to refilled and remanufactured cartridge domain from the Asia Pacific region that were selected based on sales and usage in the region and sourced from countries such as China, India, Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, Indonesia and Philippines.

“We didn’t make any qualitative judgment and they were all yield and reliability based”, revealed Neel Pillai, regional market manager - Supplies, Imaging and Printing Group for HP Asia Pacific and Japan.

The study, which reveals HP’s Inkjet Print Cartridges as twice efficient as the remanufactured and refilled cartridge brands would auger well for the growth of organized cartridge market in the country and would give sleepless nights to unorganized players.