For Canon, digitisation a big opportunity in the Indian home segment

How important is this product for the Indian market which has still not grown in digitisation?
While India has progressed quite extensively in consuming digital content because of the younger demographics of users and also because of higher adoption and penetration of smartphones, digital content creation has not been catching up so much. As a result, digitisation is relatively lesser in contrast with printing. I don’t like to say this because printing is essentially not a very eco-friendly industry... The best measurement would be to see how many documents India scans a year and how many documents India prints a year. So, if I compare, India’s printing is twice as much as scanning. We print about 150 billion documents a year and 75 billion is scanning. So, I think we still are a bigger analogue than a digital country. We feel digitisation is a big opportunity.

One segment which has been kind of a virgin segment is the home segment. There are top 15 million households in the country which can be called smart households. Every member of the house has some device and everyone has an internet connectivity. We are, therefore, looking at those households which have internet connection and have smart devices.

The portable scanner costs Rs 11,995 and the wi-fi devices come for another Rs 14,000. Do you think there is enough potential for such a device at this price point?
Wi-fi is all work at a workroom and not for the household. We feel the 90% of the sale is going to be without wi-fi. Then, if you look at these households which are internet-enabled, these devices are not even expensive. PC, smartphones or laptops all of these are above Rs 11,000 devices.

The rest of the devices already have their desirability factor in the household. So, for that, do you see this product offering value for money?
You mean if we had priced it for half, it would have seen a bigger market. We feel right now that the desirability of the device is a bigger challenge than the price. So, the demand elasticity is not linked to price as much as it is to creation of a compelling propagation. So, this is where our hurdle is. We just plan to sell 15,000 units by the end of next calender year.

Apart from this product, what new offering can we see from Canon with the festive season round the corner?
This segment we are betting big is on digital SLR. This is a sub-category which is growing at about 10%. We also have converted the ten models of digital SLR into 29 various combos and these combo prices are cheaper than what a consumer buys as individual accessories. We believe in enhancing the value proposition of customers. The price of the devices ranges from Rs 26,000 to Rs 40,000.

What are your strategies to enhance your market share and penetrate deeper into the market?
One is of course the B2B area where we are focusing on after-sales services. We are not just putting thrust on sale of products, but are looking at allied services we can gather as part of the contract. In B2B, we launched management services about 2 years ago which has become a Rs 100 crore business. The strategy is to bring a stronger customer relationship by creating workshops. The scanner market share is 25% and we target to grow it to 30%. In the office printing domain, we have a market share of 25% where we are a market leader already. So, we are planning to just stay and maintain market leadership. In digital SLR, we have a 50% market share which we would like to maintain.