Page 74 - Smart Photography

INDUSTRY OPINION

Aiming to Preserve the Rich

Indian Colours As told to Sujith Gopinath

P has been the industry leader in photo finishing
for a long time and the man driving this is
HA. 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.

Indigo was not the biggest difference is the wedding
known to people at market. That is what we are clearly
all. I still remember focussed on.
the 2009 show, which
actually changed the How has 2017 been for HP?
complete outlook. 2017 was a little bit of a tough year.
It changed our Tough from two perspectives. One,
complete business the double strike that happened
altogether. From on the economy, obviously, the
there on, getting to demonetisation, which took the cash
200 installations in away. And if you look at the wedding
photo, is incredible. business, it is a 100 percent cash
This show links business. And then there is GST
you with the implementation. GST, is 18 percent for
photographers. these machines. So on an equipment
You would meet up that costs Rs.2 crore, some dealers
with them and start pay Rs.36 lakh in taxes, which
explaining things. they never used to before. So 2017
They never invested was definitely a challenging year.
something like Rs.3 That is from an equipment selling
A. Appadurai to 4 crore before. perspective. But the biggest part of
The maximum that they invested in the story that other manufacturers do
With the experience of life was an RC machine or probably not share, and HP would is that even
participating in almost all a new machine that costed them in 2017, our business grew in double
Photofairs, what are your thoughts Rs.30 to 40 lakh. So to increase the digits. Our customers’ business grew
about CEIF 2018? ticket size of investment from that in double digits. And in this business,
The mad crowd, the two-kilometre to about 10x, you only have to talk the supplies that matter a lot, not
queue that we used to see in to the photographers. So for us, this machines alone. It is mostly about
Photofair previously, was not there is the opportunity. Close to 50,000 the number of prints that happen
yesterday. I hope it returns today or people come in, we have conversation in the market. Though there was a
tomorrow. But nevertheless, there with about 1/4th to 1/5th of them, dip in November and December, it
is lot of energy, momentum, show; and that helps our business. We take bounced back heavily and we had a
it is happening after two years and a lot of input from people as to what double digit growth of our customers’
that brings in a huge amount of they want. Innovation is something business, which is the most important
expectation from the people. We are you need to do very specifically to thing. HP, in this case, is not like
quite happy with the objectives that the needs of the people. We clearly a camera vendor, where there is
understood that. But you know 70-80
probably a distributor and then a
we were coming up with so far. I have
Smart Photography February 2018 always said this—Photofair as a show percent of the trade’s money is in one buyer. We would all have a challenge
segment called wedding photography.
actually changed the course of our
because of cash. But for us, since we
offer service to photo printers or
business. In 2008 -09, we just did
Rest is all passion, hobby etc. A little
not have anything in photo printing.
couples, that did not have any impact
bit of commercial printing exists, but
74 HP used to have these inkjets before. from a print perspective, what makes on us. Rather, it grew by double digits,
www.smartphotography.in