Pankaj Kalra expresses his views on "Will Indian newspapers opt for digital?"

Pankaj Kalra, head, production systems group, Xerox India

 

Globally, several newspapers are printed on four- colour digital production inkjet presses. The Impika digital inkjet presses from Xerox provide a variety of solutions and also cater to the newspaper printing market. We also have a product called the iPrint eXtreme. With its 28inch printing width and its speed of 375 meters per minute in CMYK, the iPrint eXtreme is perfectly suited for newspapers printing. You can, for instance, print 8,000 copies of a 40 page tabloid in one hour.
 

It is indeed true that newspaper printing industry is predominantly web offset dominated owing to very large volume requirements as well as the costs. Having said so, a lot of content is getting regionalised. In fact, we have a leading English language paper that has even suburban supplements where the volumes are generally low and the content is specific. All this in addition to city specific bulletins as well. This is where Xerox digital inkjet presses can play an important role. Moreover what also needs to be understood is that the entire process ends with the distribution of these newspapers .This is getting as decentralised as possible owing to mixed content and increasing delivery costs. Plus, the shelf life of a newspaper is only a day, and there are major challenges of inventory management. With the improvements in quality and competitive running costs, automated print process the digital inkjet presses are ideally suited for this scenario.
 

Newspaper printing is high volume and low costs. Having said that, there is always a tipping point beyond which costs can’t go down and technology evolves to an altogether different level thereby generating the desired value for the customer. Further, where the content becomes customised to a region and even further specific to locations, then digital inkjet printing plays an extremely important part. 
 

The worldwide inkjet equipment market is seeing tremendous growth and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10% (2012-2017). The Impika iPrint eXtreme has a duty cycle of 110 million A4 impressions per month, which is testimony to the fact that it can really print large volumes. The technology is still evolving and logically we can expect this duty cycle to be increasing with improvements in the print quality.
 

At present, the biggest challenge is about finding the best fit. How much print volume, in how much time, at what price? This is how we would look at it. This is purely circulation specific but has a lot to do with overall market economics. India has the cheapest market price for a newspaper. In Vietnam, a 24 page tabloid, costs 6,000 Vietnamese Dong, which is around INR 19, about the same as most dailies in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. India remains the only market in the world where the newspaper is distributed at such a low price. While it’s good for the readers, the challenge is to keep cutting on the costs of production so as to maintain the affordability for the masses.  
 

The only advice to newspaper printers is that while we can see some migration happening from print to electronic format in newspapers, bulk of it is still printed. The successful ones are those who would probably sense this overlap and imbibe the best technology to keep making profits. This could include a relook at their business model of which printing is a crucial part