“At Drupa, Indian visitors were willing to learn things beyond the press,” says Puneet Chadha

We had displayed products and services in commercial printing, labels and packaging, publishing, and direct mail. While there are specific products for each of the segment, it will be difficult to judge one particular product that fits every segment. I think the HP Indigo 5600 (which is our flagship model) as good starting point for commercial printers and HP Indigo 6600 for labels and packaging printers.  Both these models can do a wide variety of applications.

Taking pride of place at HP’s Drupa stand was the new B2 size Indigo  10000 press, which was already on beta pre-drupa. HP would start to ship in the early part of FY13 which is just a few months from now. Since this was a grand success for us, shipments would clearly be according to the orders placed in Drupa . We would surely have a backlog for customers, not due to production limitations but due to number of engineers relative to orders received who need to ensure every press is a success.

We at HP, consider HP Indigo 5600 as our flagship product as it represents one-third of our printer installation base across world. After four years HP launched the HP Indigo 5500 but, HP Indigo 5600 continues to be our best-selling product. 

HP believes in launching products globally at the same time, and do not favour any special occasion or an event for this. Out of the five recently launched printers in Drupa, four of these are available for immediate order in India. Besides, HP Indigo WS7250 and HP Indigo WS7200, HP Indigo 5600 and HP Indigo 7600 have already been launched in India. In terms of performance, we can only say that we have surpassed our performance at Drupa compared to Drupa 2008. 

Though there were a lot of inkjet technologies displayed in Drupa, I wouldn’t call it an inkjet version 2.0. Inkjet will play in the low value, medium quality high volume space at least for the few years.  Toner on the other side has reached saturation in terms of not being able to produce ground-breaking innovation. The electro ink technology of HP Indigo has been able to introduce some amazing innovations on quality, speed and cost fronts.  The fact that we had a triple digit order for the newly launched B2 – digital offset press makes me to call this Drupa as B2 – Digital Drupa. 

Again, in the inkjet space, HP is an unchallenged market leader and the display of HP T410 and T230 only strengthened our leadership in the inkjet market.Besides digital and inkjet, we see this big convergence/merger of electronics and print.

There were some brilliant examples of Augmented Reality (AR) with print at the HP booth. Visitors could almost see a video of every single communication in the HP stall, besides scanning the energy drink to see a video of how it helps marketers.  Almost every single vendor collateral and poster had QR codes. If one believes that “Purpose of a Print is to Sell something”, integration of electronics is making it better.  Besides this, Indian printers were definitely keen on standardisation and automation of workflows.

One of the clear differences that we saw with the Indian visitors at Drupa, was the willingness to learn things beyond the press, like web2print, standardisation, MIS software etc. Many customers who visited our booth spent a good amount of time in learning from the host of solutions that we have. 

My takeaway: “Digital is main stream” is clearly evident, we heard customers saying “Digital is now” instead of “Digital is future” that we heard in previously. There was tremendous amount of interest in packaging; one of the busiest areas in our stall was the labels and packaging area. We are optimistic about the opportunities that are ahead of us. On the other side, Drupa cannot change the realities that print industry faces, the overcapacity (at least in the western world) and the consolidation and downsizing as a result of that, both for print service providers and manufacturers. The time delay provides an opportunity to Indian printing companies to change and make the smart decisions. Most of the printers know the answer. We are optimistic.