HP offers Ink Advantage to its partners

New Delhi: In an effort to increase its consumable business and make
its cartridges affordable for customers, HP is launching a whole new scheme to
sell both printers and ink cartridges. According to Christoph Schell,
VP-Consumer Go-To-Market and Inkjet and Web Solutions, IPG, HP Asia Pacific &
Japan, the new Ink Advantage Program is not just targeted to sell mere hardware
but an entire system to its customers. Initiated a few months back in India and
limited only to HP's corporate and government accounts till date, the IT giant
now wants to formulate the entire process and take it to the consumer and SME
segments.

Under the Ink Advantage program HP has increased the price of the hardware
(printer) but significantly reduced the price of the ink that will help in
lowering the cost per page of printing. 'India is a big market for us with over
75 percent share and we have got a very big partner network across the country.
We now want to upgrade the entire value chain and set-up a proper system to run
this scheme,' said Schell. Instead of adding more partners HP is looking forward
to making the best use of the existing set-up to run the new program by
enhancing the role of the partners. 'We have a widespread and loyal partner
network in India. The idea is to make them grow and evolve with us, keeping pace
with new and changing market dynamics,' he said.

In order to cope with the new sales model, HP has developed an exclusive
training program for its partners that not only includes product and sales
training but customer handling, account maintenance, business and finance
management, as well. The renewed approach of system sale has been planned in a
bid to get associated with customers throughout the product lifetime and offer
them all kinds of services required. Incidentally, innovative schemes like,
dial-a-cartridge, e-mail-a-cartridge, etc initiated by HP will further
facilitate the new model to gain momentum.

The Ink Advantage program has been framed to help partners earn additional
revenues allowing them better growth prospects. 'In today's scenario we are not
interested in selling printers, rather we are interested in selling pages. The
good news is that today, partners are even inclined to add value to sales and
services offered to customers and are ready to move from just being box
pushers.' The new scheme will be executed through HP partners, HP World Stores
as well as select LFRs and commercial stores.