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Vipin Kumar

NEW DELHI, Feb. 2

ARE corporates becoming more creative? Seems so; if one is to go by the amount of printing they do in-house.

"In-house printing is very much on these days. Corporates are printing brochures, leaflets, catalogues and even flyers in-house using colour printers," says Mr Nitin Hiranandani, Country Business Manager, Imaging and Printing Systems, Hewlett-Packard (HP) India.

"Companies are no longer dependent on offset presses to print these material. If they need to print only 1,000-2,000 copies, they prefer to do it themselves," Mr Hiranandani says.

Needless to say, HP is cashing in on this trend as sale of its top-end printers surge amongst corporates. As per HP's estimates, colour is the fastest growing category in the laser printer market, with growth of 35-40 per cent, nearly 10 per cent higher than the monochrome printers.

Mr Hiranandani says Internet is a major factor that induces companies to create brochures and catalogues on their own instead of depending on advertising agencies.

"Many companies download material from the Net and take printouts. For multinationals, this is easier since they can almost use the same material globally," he says, adding that HP prints all its brochures, catalogues and other similar material on its own.

But the urge to print publicity material in-house has more to do with companies' efforts to cut costs in a gloomy economy rather than satisfying their creativity.

Agrees Mr Gopinath Menon, Vice-President, TBWA Anthem: "The trend to do printing in-house is clearly visible in the past one year. This helps companies cut their spending on the point-of-purchase (PoP) publicity by as much as 15-20 per cent." Certainly, the gain of companies such as HP is the loss for ad agencies as they earlier used to charge clients for creating PoP material.

Although printer sales dropped by 18 per cent as per a MAIT (Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology) mid-year review, Mr Hiranandani is hopeful that the current quarter should see some revival in demand. "We should see a good growth in this quarter over the previous period,'' he said. When digital technology began to swamp our lives, one of the promises its proponents delivered was that our offices would soon be paperless. Where are we today?

"Paperless offices will never happen," Mr Hiranandani rules out the idea. "The information base has become so large that people are printing a lot more these days," he says.

Even at homes, people are taking printouts more than ever as it is difficult to dispense with the mindset of reading straight from a paper rather than on the screen.

It is estimated that the total volume of information doubles every 3-7 years. Digital information will grow from 20 per cent to 70 per cent of the total.

"Such kind of information explosion makes it impossible for people to do away with papers. And they will keep on taking printouts," Mr Hiranandani says. The fall in prices of printers - you get a Laserjet printer for Rs 18,000 while inkjet costs just Rs 5,000-6,000 - and more user-friendly features are the prime reasons driving homes to go for printers.

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