Panel discussion: 'How should the Indian print industry measure success? Topline or bottomline'

The panel discussion featured Narendra Paruchuri of Pragati Offset representing traditional print firms, professional print CEO, C J Jassawala of Thomson Press. Joing them were Nilesh Parwani of Vistaprint and Dharti Desai of MOS, touted as the disruptors of the status quo. 
 

Paruchuri who set the ball rolling for the 72-minute session said, "Goal of any business organisation is to make money. Topline-bottomline should be secondary concerns. As a business organisation one should always strive to get your efficiencies right and keep improving them."
 

Jassawala drawing upon his experience with Thomson cautioned, " One should never use the past to take decisions about the future. Markets dictates the requirements of a successful business. The key is strike the right balance to include cost rationalisation without compromising with quality."

Dharti Desai of MOS spoke about the unique nature of direct mail printing and their recent investments, she said,"Our mantra is 'on time, every time', we have trained our team and ingrained the MOS' motto in them. Our investments have taken a toll on our bottom line, fortunately for us the business has been coming in to help us recoup most of that investment."

Nilesh Parwani of Vistaprint talked in detail about Vistaprint's business model, he said, "Our customers come to us with extremely short run jobs, and you can see an analogy between what we do and the industrial revolution of the 19th century. We had to start off by investing heavily in order to cater to our customer. Now it is imperative that our quality should be good enough to have repeat customers."
 

Iqbal Kherodawala joined the panelists and posed questions in his role of the devil's advocate.