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where we are—the acceptance levels are machine now do the same on bigger sales, just like any other organisation.
increasing in small cities and towns also. machines. But the key factor is engagement, the
unique way we engage with our partners
What are the new products you have Then we have our post-printing and share the knowledge. We are very
displayed at the CEIF? solutions—Digital Spot UV and Foiling transparent in terms of sharing all the
We are demonstrating our flagship machine. Both these are innovations information.
product in photo—71 HC (High Chroma), from a company called MGI. They have
a different toner technology, where the brought it for the first time in the world. How wide is your service network
colour gamut is close to sRGB. So what MGI is a Konica Minolta group company, and what are the customer support
we see is what we get. The machine in which Konica Minolta owns around 40 initiatives in India?
has the capability to reproduce colour percent stake. This machine has Konica Service is the fastest growing division in
gamut close to sRGB, but using CMYK Minolta technology in it. The inkjet our organisation. Close to 50 percent of
process. This makes it unique for photo printing heads are from Konica Minolta. our people are from the service team, and
applications, may be in terms of any RGB they are growing exponentially. So we
data. In India, wedding photography What are your partner engagement currently have more that 3500 machines
is very popular and people are using strategies? What unique benefits can in production category, right from J&K
this machine for it. In a lot of other someone enjoy being a Konica Minolta to Kanyakumari. And Konica Minolta has
countries, people are using it for different partner? the largest number of machines in the
applications where they do a lot of The very basic partner engagement North-East also. Among all the OEMs put
working with RGB data. programme is the training programme together, we have much more machines
we do. We do not differentiate between in the North-East than everybody else put
Another flagship product we have a partner team and Konica Minolta team together. So we are catering to states like
recently launched is the AccurioPress when it comes to training programme. Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya etc. and we
XT100. It is a 100 pages per minute So whatever training is available for our have installs in all these places. Maybe we
equipment. It can print on media up to team is also available for our partners. are not very strong in many other states,
400 gsm in thickness. Usually in most Someone who carries a Konica Minolta but in North-East, we are the leaders. It is
cases, people paste prints back-to-back flag is important to us, whether he is an difficult to reach out to these parts, but still
to make thick albums. Now with 400 employee or a partner. When the Konica we were able to achieve this and we are
gsm, we can print on both sides and Minolta base gets stronger, we will have thankful to our teams for this.
give similar effects. This machine allows more avenues of training and we will
printing in banner size also. We can print regionalise them for more localised What are the major challenges you face
up to 13 x 51 inches. So people who trainings. Then we have different in the market?
printed the Karizma albums on a smaller programmes and schemes to drive the We Indians are not very organised. From
the customer point of view,
the lack of operator skill
level is a problem. Another
challenge is the way we
assume that digital printing
will do anything and
everything. Every equipment
has a certain bandwidth. It
requires certain parameters
to be provided to the machine
to make it perform very well.
The quality of paper that
we have in India is another
challenge. Majority of the
papers are not manufactured
locally. Infrastructure is a
big challenge. After GST, the
moving of equipment across
the country is challenging,
though it has smoothened
somewhat. These are some
of the challenges, but we
see every challenge as an
opportunity. Whenever we
have such challenges, we try Smart Photography
to create more infrastructure February 2018
to overcome all these. |SP

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