Every Challenge Is An Opportunity

Manish Gupta, DGM IP & PP marketing, Konica Minolta India, elaborated the strategies of the company in a chat with Smart Photography at the CEIF 2018. Excerpts...

- Sujith Gopinath

How was 2017 for Fujifilm in India and what are the expectations for 2018?

Three quarters have been good. One or two months were affected due to GST implementation. But in spite of that, it has been good so far. We have big expectations for 2018. The market is growing, not only in photo, but in other segments also, digital printing is growing. We are very hopeful of at least double digit growth. That is what we are internally targeting.

What will be your business strategies for 2018?

We are surely going to expand our product portfolio. We currently have complete solutions right from pre-press to printing, we have a couple of products going from entry level production to very high level production printing. Our machines can print up to B2+ size. Then we also have solutions for post-press. We can do spot UV and digital foiling. We have displayed the samples in our stall in CEIF 2018. Those are printed on AccurioJet KM1 and finished on MGI JETvarnish. Then we are also entering into label printing. So those are some of the segments, we as a company are getting into, besides photo.

How about consumer printing?

Our internal figures show that we are still growing in that segment. We are currently overall number three and number two in some of the segments in colour printing. But Konica Minolta, as a brand, is comparatively new, being less that 10 years old. So if we are at that position, it is a significant achievement. In production printing, for the last five years, we have been number one. So that is a very important strength of Konica Minolta as a brand.

With strong competition around, how do you plan to achieve your targets?