HP beckons partners to retail photo printing market

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced its entry into the retail photo printing
market with the launch of its Retail Photo Solutions and online photo services
through Snapfish. Snapfish will offer consumers free online photo sharing,
unlimited online photo storage and professionally developed digital camera
prints for as low as Rs 2.95.

V Narayanan, Director-Retail Photo Solutions, Imaging and Printing Group, HP
APAC-Japan said, “HP has around 2,550 channel partners around the country
presently and with this retail entry, we will create a lot of opportunities for
our existing as well as new partners. The mobile and digital camera market is
growing rapidly in the country. People presently store there photos online or on
CDs but with this launch of HP retail, they can print there stored photos very
cheap price. This will be our first entry into the service domain as we were
totally into products before, and this will also create opportunities for our
partners to enter into the service domain with us.”

With this entry, HP will be creating opportunities for channel partners as
all these outlets will have franchise-based models. Presently, there are around
70,000 photo outlets in the country and every year, 16 million camera phones and
one million digital cameras are sold in the country, which highlights the
opportunities in the printing space for photos.

From (L-R) V Krishnan, Mandira Bedi, V Narayanan and Bala Parthasarthy at the launch of HP's Retail Photo Solutions and Snapfish in Mumbai

V Krishnan, GM-Consumer Sales, Imaging and Printing Group, HP India said, “HP
plans to open 3,000 retail photo outlets with HP Retail Photo Solutions by 2010,
and photo delivery through Snapfish across India. We hope to change the dynamics
of the photo printing market.”

Speaking on the launch of Snapfish in India, Bala Parthasarthy, VP-Online
Imaging Imaging and Printing Group, HP APAC-Japan said, “Snapfish has gained
popularity globally and we expect the same in India. It will change the way
consumers click, print and share photos in India.”