The big fat Indian wedding is turning out to be extremely lucrative for imaging company Kodak, which now wants to bet big on the recession-proof nature of weddings here to push its market share of photographic papers used to print wedding albums.

“Right now, our market share of photographic paper is in excess of 50 per cent. We want to take it to over 55 per cent in the next 12 months,” Mr Srinivasu Saraswatula, Country Business Manager for Kodak India's Consumer Digital Group, told Business Line .

Wedding days

According to figures compiled by Kodak, there are around 12,000 weddings held every day in India, where around 120 “wedding days” a year are considered auspicious. Around 15 lakh photos are shot every wedding day, which means that the total pictures shot could be around 2,160 billion per annum. Kodak is betting on wedding albums because most people these days prefer to shoot on digital cameras and store photos on hard disks, thus keeping photo printers out of the loop. In order to push wedding photographers, Kodak has launched an award for the best wedding photographers and brings out a special coffee table book to showcase their works.

Discussing the strategy that Kodak wants to adopt for growing market share, Mr Saraswatula said the company was launching new types of paper and also working with photographic labs that offer larger size albums or more pages per album. “We are also trying to get people to create albums for other occasions like the bride's first entry into the groom's house after the wedding, head-tonsuring ceremony, and others,” he said.

Indians are growing richer and this is also causing people to spend more on weddings, including on the photo album. “Earlier, people used to spend around Rs 10,000 on a photo album and now they are spending anywhere between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 3 lakh on them,” said Mr Saraswatula.

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