"We did business of over Rs 306 crore last fiscal and are targeting Rs 400 crore from our Indian operations this year"

Betting big on the corporate segment, Canon India is looking at achieving a
40 percent growth this fiscal. The company is actively targeting at potentially
profitable segments like e-governance and revving up its retail footprint, in
order to achieve this growth. Kazuto Ogawa talks about the company's current
focus for the region and how it plans to make further inroads in India.

What is the focus of your Indian operations?

We are focusing a lot of our efforts towards targeting the corporate
segment. Almost 50 percent of our business is now focusing towards this segment
and moving forward we are likely to continue engaging with corporates in
different ways.

Kazuto Ogawa President and CEO, Canon Singapore Pte

There is a big shift towards color imaging and printing
happening today. People are moving from monochrome to color and we have our
product offerings rightly placed to tap this trend.

A lot of our customers demanded not just plain vanilla
products but comprehensive solutions from us. This is a welcome trend. So, we
are putting a lot of effort towards delivering printing solutions for our end
customers.

What kind of growth are you looking at for the Indian
market? Do you intend to add more manpower for your local operations as well?

We firmly believe that India is one of the fastest growing markets globally.
The past years have really been quite fruitful for the company. Keeping this in
mind we are aiming for 40 percent growth for our Indian operations.

We did a business of over Rs 306 crore last fiscal. And we
are targeting Rs 400 crore revenue mark for our Indian operations this year.

Currently, we have about 440 employees for our Indian
operations. This is a big workforce, considering the fact that a lot of our work
happens with the help of the channel community. We are not looking at adding any
big numbers to this manpower figure. However, we would be hiring people,
wherever it is necessary.

his is a high growth figure that you are attempting to
reach. How do you propose to achieve this target?

India is a very big market for us and our Indian operations have done a
great job for the company. Moving forward, we are setting greater targets for
ourselves.

Since we are aiming for a 40 percent growth here in India, it
would mean that more effort would be needed towards realizing the unlocked
potential within the market.

As part of our game plan, we would be increasing our focus
towards catering to end—customers in a better way. We already have a fair
amount of focus in this direction within India. This is primarily in the form of
28 DigiClick zones and 140 IT Imaging zones. We are looking at increasing these
numbers to 100 and 300 respectively by the end of this year.

The government of India has announced the setting up of a
big number of common service centers at the village level. Among other devices,
these centers would surely have printers as well. How do you look at the
burgeoning e-governance segment in India?

Since India is a big country with so much of diversity, we think that
e-governance is one such segment that binds all the regions into one addressable
entity. We understand that it is a big segment for us. More importantly, the
government of India has already announced its big plans for bridging the digital
divide.

We surely want to be a part of this activity and all our
products are ideally placed to address this segment. We are already involved
with the Reserve Bank of India for its electronic cheque clearance project. With
the help of projects like these, we are continuously working towards adding
value to segments like e-governance.

Revenue Mix From Various Divisions

How do you partner with the solution provider community in
the Indian region?

Solution providers are one of the most important partner segments for us. We
do a lot of implementations in association with our solution providers or
systems integration partners. Since we have a major focus towards selling our
products to the enterprise, we have nine solution partners to address this
enterprise segment for the company.

Additionally, we also have partnerships with system
integrators to cater to different end-customer needs. Partnerships with system
integrators are a big bonus when you are targeting segments like e-governance.
This is a segment, which requires a lot of end-user level customization and this
can easily be achieved with the help of a local system integrator.

Zia Askari