Trends & Opportunity in Indian Printer & Scanner Market – 2015

This is the era of network and wireless printers.  However, with the advent of technologies like 3D printing and scanning a new avenue of business opportunities have opened up for enterprising resellers and channels in India. This article analyses the present trends and the innovations that are to hit market in the near future.

Shankar Narayanan, ex- Regional Manager for Wep Peripherals  (WEP) South, Hari Prasad,  of Breeze Designs and Printers,  that sells printers and designs 3D Printing solutions –who follows the Indian IT market closely and Arun K,  managing partner for dell tech  Pvt ltd.,  who resells printers and scanners across India, and has recently started selling the 3 dimensional cousins for the past one year,  share their observations and help analyze the recent trends in the printer and scanner market in India.

The overall printer market in India has grown at around 12% as per a Gartner Report.  The conventional inkjet and printing design has fallen over the period 2011-2015 because of a drop in PC sales. This is also being driven by the insistence of the customers for an environment friendly policy towards printing requirements.

3D Printing:

Hari Prasad, a reseller of HP printers and offers 3D printer solutions from Aztec, describes a typical house hold or normal 3d printing process – “3D printers use 3 dimensional layering based on a blue print – this results in fabrication of complex 3 dimensional designs.   The user selects the raw material – which can typically be metal, plastic or ceramic powder.  When a 3 dimensional design is loaded, the powder is delivered and fused through a print nozzle and occasionally a laser beam or glue is used to fuse or blend ceramic or plastic powder together to form the desired 3D object. “

Arun adds that assembled do-it-yourself (DIY) kits of 3D printers are now in demand.   These are normally imported from China and he says that he sells about 10-15 units at the entry level.  Each unit would cost between Rs 75000 to Rs 1 lac. Most of the printers are brought at an individual level by hobbyists.  Small companies buy them for verification of designs and not for mass production, he adds.  Arun states that 3D printing industry in India is in a nascent stage.

Hari states that Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) has proposed 4D printing – where sub structures ( parts) created can self-assemble into a composite 3D structure.   This will be a new way forward he says.

The 3-D printers market will see  a 10 fold increase over the next  5 years, according to a Gartner report.   The greater Asia Pacific region total shipments were at 1,643 units in 2013 and would be more than 14,800 units in 2017. Worldwide the same number of printers would be around 60000 units in terms of commissioning – Arun points out the same report.  “There are also some companies in the grey market are making printers from scratch,” he says.  “A recent Computer World report indicates that the Indian 3D printer market will grow upto $ 79 million by 2021.  The “Make in India” initiative can bring more opportunities for domestic 3D printer manufacturing.”

The globally established companies such as Stratasys and Optomec have partnerships or alliances with India based technology companies for increasing their customer base. Other established global players in 3D printing industry include Fabbster, 3D Systems, Leapfrog and Flashforge.

Major players active in India 3D printing market (including manufacturers and distributors) space are Altem Technologies, Imaginarium, Brahma 3, KCbots and JGroup Robotics.

Conventional Printers and Scanners:

Shankar Narayanan, who has till recently worked with various printer manufacturers like Canon and Xerox, and has handled maintenance services and product sales, observed a decreasing sales trend  over the last 5 years.   Arun says that his business of conventional printers and scanners has fallen by 33%.  Both of them agree on two reasons – one is the decline in PC sales – as more than 40% of desk side and basic network printer sales happen along with desktops.  Another reason has been the eco friendly policy adopted by most enterprises.  Both customers and enterprises have moved away from printed invoices, notices and other transaction items that earlier required manual approvals and signatures.  Telecom vendors and banks who are the largest consumers of printers have refrained from making new purchases over the past 4 years.

However, the industry is still not down on an overall basis.  “Indian organizations are still largely paper-driven.But there is an increasing importance of digitization and the need to access information anytime, anywhere. This represents an opportunity for print providers to expand their services into optimizing the document workflows that support business processes,” says a Gartner report of 2014.

The report indicated an overall 9% decline from the last year ( 2013).   While HP remained the market leader in the Indian printer, copier and MFP market with 4,43,200 units and a market share of 51.5%, it was followed by Canon (1,77,800 units, 21%) and Epson (73,700 units, 9%). Samsung Electronics accounted for 7% (58,100 units), while Ricoh accounted for 6% of the market in the third quarter of 2014.

Shankar Narayanan adds that the pecking order has remained essentially the same for the last few years.   However, industrial customers are increasingly focusing on network printers and 3D printers recently.

3D scanners:

Like 3D printing, the market for 3D scanning is also gaining speed.   Our research and talks with some resellers  have indicated that this market is still not mature in India, nor has the technology gained exposure.  US based 3D-scanning solution provider Aztec has achieved some progress in India through some of its distributors.

Hari Prasad says that a typical 3D scanner is handheld and can create sharp, high resolution 3D images.   Usually this is a great addition to augmented and virtual reality ( AR and VR) imagery.   With e-commerce and real estate services market going online,  augmented reality designs for real estate and product show case will become more prevalent applications of 3d scanning and imaging he says.   Some of the startups have offered 3D scanning solutions in India for the upcoming E-commerce, Healthcare and retail industry in India.   Mr. Kartheeswaran, CEO of XploreAR adds that he has created a complete solution on Augmented Reality for Healthcare, Real Estate and E-commerce sectors.

Digital Printing:

There have been a consistent increase in high quality digital photos these days.  Canon has unveiled DreamLabo 5000 in India starting with the Bengaluru market, our observation is that the volume of prints is rapidly growing and this is obviously because of an interest from consumers for high-quality photographs and albums – according to a news release in their website.

Shankar Narayanan opines  that photo printing has now become essential  as lot of portfolios are being built, as more and more photographers create printed hard copy portfolios to share.

Hari Prasad, who runs a digital printing unit says that multi-lingual printing is currently the biggest challenge.  Though Indian printers are today equipped with the latest computer controlled printing machines and flow lines for binding, while state-of-the-art digital technologies are used in pre-press. UV digital printing and inkjet technology are also on the rise in India;only 15% of the market is really organized. The advent of global brands, rising consumerism and growth of the pharmaceutical industry have seen an increase in the scope for package printing.  The industry is clocking 12-15% on an annual rate.

In summary, the Indian Printing industry is at crossroads.  The Digital and Commercial printing industry is growing at a fair rate of 15%, while the consumer printing and imaging industry is on a decline.  3D printing and scanning technology and its applications are new entrants in the market, and over the past 3 years have started on an uptick, thereby resulting in an overall positive propulsion of the printing and imaging industry.