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Homework might give school goers nightmares but the word is now music to printing major HP’s ears.
With more schools giving assignments that involve researching on the internet and taking prints for submission, demand for home printers is on the rise.
HP, which holds nearly half the overall printing market in India, is the biggest beneficiary of this new trend. “The trend we are seeing in the market has completely reversed. Education is the biggest market for home printing now. The basic requirement we see is from school projects. Even from Tier-2 and 3 cities ” Leo Joseph, Senior Director, Printing Systems and Solutions at HP India, told BusinessLine .
To add to this, home printing is now getting cheaper with new technologies cutting down the per page cost to just 10 paise per page.
Market share
HP, which previously did not have a presence in this low cost printing technology called Ink Tank, has seen its market share jump in Home segment since the launch of its first product in the segment. Its market share in the segment jumped from 10 per cent in the first quarter of calendar year 2018 to 17.5 per cent by the end of the third quarter.
The “Biggest barrier for printing in home segment was the ease of printing and the cost. Now with our HP Smart app that’s available on Android and Apple, you can print anything to your closest printer with a click of a button. This is a whole new space of mobility printing that we are enabling, which will also enable printing for education purposes because there’s a lot of content on your phones and tablets that can now be easily printed,” Joseph said.
HP is betting on the Home segment which contributes to about 50 per cent of its overall print revenues in the country. The company is also experimenting with some lifestyle products such as a pocket printer called Sprocket.
“In digital age, we end up clicking a lot of pictures, but we don’t print them. With Sprocket, we want to bring back the magic of memories alive,” Joseph said. “We also have some new innovations that we will be coming out with this year. We will also be expanding the sprocket range.” Joseph added.
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