Aiming To Preserve The Rich Indian Colours

HP has been the industry leader in photo finishing for a long time and the man driving this is A. Appadurai, Country Manager for the HP Indigo and Inkjet presses, India and Sri Lanka. Smart Photography had a chance to interact with him and here are the excerpts. To read the full interview, visit www. smartphotography.in.

- Sujith Gopinath

With the experience of participating in almost all Photofairs, what are your thoughts about CEIF 2018?

The mad crowd, the two-kilometre queue that we used to see in Photofair previously, was not there yesterday. I hope it returns today or tomorrow. But nevertheless, there is lot of energy, momentum, show; it is happening after two years and that brings in a huge amount of expectation from the people. We are quite happy with the objectives that we were coming up with so far. I have always said this—Photofair as a show actually changed the course of our business. In 2008 -09, we just did not have anything in photo printing. HP used to have these inkjets before. Indigo was not known to people at all. I still remember the 2009 show, which actually changed the complete outlook. It changed our complete business altogether. From there on, getting to 200 installations in photo, is incredible. This show links you with the photographers. You would meet up with them and start explaining things. They never invested something like Rs.3 to 4 crore before.

The maximum that they invested in life was an RC machine or probably a new machine that costed them Rs.30 to 40 lakh. So to increase the ticket size of investment from that to about 10x, you only have to talk to the photographers. So for us, this is the opportunity. Close to 50,000 people come in, we have conversation with about 1/4th to 1/5th of them, and that helps our business. We take a lot of input from people as to what they want. Innovation is something you need to do very specifically to the needs of the people. We clearly understood that. But you know 70-80 percent of the trade’s money is in one segment called wedding photography. Rest is all passion, hobby etc. A little bit of commercial printing exists, but from a print perspective, what makes the biggest difference is the wedding market. That is what we are clearly focussed on.

How has 2017 been for HP?