“We’re to surge business,heeding Assured Print Services initiatives”
Under the economic meltdown situation, there are two basic and influential ways to sustain for corporates: cost cutting, and initiatives to increase demand of their products. But all is the game of appropriate strategies and their proper implementation, so every company brings up their top strategic maven at the helm of management. Recently, HP did the same by bringing in Puneet Chadha as director, HP Graphic Arts, who is committed to ensure the soaring growth in business, during challenging prevailing scenario, not only for HP but also for all links of HP Scitex printer-users network. “We’re to surge business, heeding Assured Print Services initiatives, expanding HP LFPs installations and adding more new products to our existing vast product portfolio in large format printing segment,” he averred solemnly, in tête-à-tête with Sonal Khurana of Sign & Graphics.
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Stressing on the positive standpoints of its recent launches, upcoming machines and programmes in the pipeline, HP Graphic Arts is bringing up new challenges in the wide-format print market of India. Now the company has reclassified its product portfolio with the addition of Scitex, Nur and ColorSpan that includes eco-solvent in the line. This comprehensive portfolio creates a solution for its customers to gain right products, services and satisfactions to specific needs.
“Typically in yesteryears, new product announcements, adoption of new technologies, merger with other companies and acquisition of other organisations reveal our forward looking approach. So far, we have enabled ourselves to progress into graphic arts business with moving from technical markets to various kinds of graphic markets, scaling up the business with ColorSpan, Nur, Scitex and organically within our own portfolio with Eco-solvent, DesignJet series, etc. Now, we need to transform that business, with lots of initiatives, especially Assured Printing Services, and HP Scitex printer-users network,” stated Puneet.
“Under Assured Printing Services (APS) initiatives, we seek to be an enabler to boost business of those print service providers’(PSPs) who are using our large format printers especially the HP Scitex machines. Being started on the line of our Digital print network, APS programme is based on the coordination we get from our large format machines users network. If one can work with a select organisation – end customer or print buyer, we scale it up to associate them to that organisation, which liberally support PSPs to get more jobs. Thus, under this initiative, we work as a bridge between PSPs and end-customers, resulting win-win situation for us, PSPs and end-customers as well,” he elaborated.
On asking about the future plans to constantly target the end-users on behalf of print service providers, he replied promptly, “Yes, this initiative would continue this year in a wider scale and more organised manner. And it would be packaged very well, as we are seeing this market converging with large-format people going in for super-wide format. In this context, we want to have a network of our countrywide print service providers having strong engagement with the end-customers. Whether the print orders get rotated through them or us, our ultimate objective is to increase their business alongside ours.”
Talking about the new products to be launched in near future, Puneet divulged, “HP 950 and HP 45500 are prime products in the ColorSpan portfolio, which will be launched very soon. In terms of UV, we have initiated the installations of HP XP 5300 right now. In the Scitex portfolio, we have recently announced to launch HP 7500 but it’s not available in India at the moment. We will make an announcement for that shortly. And the Latex, of course, is a new technology coming up, we are set to launch HP DesignJet L65500 equipped with this technology. All these new products will keep coming as an ongoing practice in every quarter. In terms of technology, our customers are very attentive about UV. The market moving towards UV confirms that there is a new market, which will be developing specifically towards flatbed UV in the coming years.”
Regarding the exchange programme of used-products, he said, “We do that all the time. And this is something, which we consider as the need of the market these days. The customers who have known HP machines are very keen to have them. In this scenario, we scrap the unbranded machines.”
On querying about the impact of economic meltdown, when many people withdraw orders, he said, “I don’t see any adverse impact of this global economic crisis on our business and machine users’ jobs as well. Our customers are very positive and giving us good response, and we are still busy in doing new installations and transformations. In fact, our sales are increasing and we have been seeing high growth, as our customers receive faster return on invested capital in our products.”
Commenting on last but not the least query regarding the latest changes or updates in his division, Puneet stated, “As of now no big changes take place in the division per se. But the Graphic Arts is a strategic growing business unit, showing one of the highest growth rates in HP. With the integration of Nur and ColorSpan, signage has become quite a large portfolio. Earlier our product line was Large-format, Scitex and Indigo. However, we have reclassified this product line and renamed it as Design, Signage and Digital Prints. Now, the signage part in this line includes Scitex, Nur and ColorSpan comprising the Eco-Solvent making the portfolio absolute.”