Good evening,

Honourable distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

I am humbled by the honour and on behalf of my company Penguin Random House, I congratulate the team of PrintWeek India for honouring members in the printing industry at this Eight PrintWeek India Awards. With PrintWeek’s nationwide presence and reach in more than 350 cities across India every month and providing new insights in printing, this is a great communication medium.

With India slated as the fastest growing economy in 2016-17, having grown @7.6% in 2015-16, experts believe that our growth rate will be over at 7.8% in the next three years.

India’s economy has shown signs of gaining momentum; business confidence has picked up; GST will be a game-changer and will bring in some challenges on compliance. Overall it will be good for the economy; households are benefiting from favourable pay rises and a near-normal monsoon. In addition, the current account came close to balancing in Q2 FY 2016 due to a lower oil bill and subdued gold imports highlighting the country’s vulnerability to external risks. However, the economy is not firing on all cylinders and growth has been uneven across sectors.

Reducing stress in banks’ balance sheets is vital to boosting credit growth and supporting fixed investment, which plunged in Q1 FY 2016 and dragged down GDP growth a bit.

With the Internet becoming an everyday aspect of life, we hear that how long will print survive. The new generation is favouring digital over physical, which would mean that print is suffering, I don’t think so. Our digital revenue is somewhere between 7.5 - 10% of our total revenue. Internationally we have seen this to reach a level of approximately 30%, but have peaked at that. Print continues to dominate in trade publishing.

Speaking with avid book lovers, they love the smell of paper, let’s keep the paper smell good forever.

With options of digital printing, print-on-demand and one-book model the print industry is there to live forever. We need innovation, investment in R&D, technological advancement, teamwork between the printer and publisher etc, to enable us to compete with international players in the neighbouring countries. This will be a win-win situation for both, printer and publisher.

We at Penguin Random House partner with our print companies; we do not treat them as vendors but partners. We have a review mechanism wherein we share what worked and what did not on a quarterly basis. Our print partners have taken our feedback positively and implemented the suggestions. I think in this day and age where we think specialist cannot be challenged, a non-specialist can think out-of-the-box and instigate a thought-provoking idea. We have promoted a culture of trust with our print partners and both teams work in tandem.

I would like to propose – a forum where printers and publishers meet to brainstorm – trends in technology, market demand, the vision of the publishing/printing industry, innovate and work as one team to reap benefits.

I studied in a school that had a motto - 'To Greater Height'. The printer/publisher relationship needs to be taken to higher levels. Let us work towards it.

Thank you and pleasure to be part of the family.