We can grow three times in India in five years

How has been your financial performance been in the
last fiscal?

The fiscal year just ended in March, so I cant share any specific numbers
at this point of time. However, I can say that with regard to last year, our
sales figures have come down but our profitability has gone up. This has largely
been due to the structural reforms over the last year.

What are some of the structural reforms?

Our primary businesses are printer and projector as well as our Quartz
division under Seiko. The LCD business is something we are coming out of. Also,
we have shrunk our semiconductor business to a great extent. The major reason
for this is that we do not own the key final applications in those product
segments as compared to some of our Taiwanese and Chinese competitors. In the
semiconductor space however, we are still bullish about certain niche product
lines including OLED (Organic LED) and e-paper, which we believe are unique
business models for us. We have also gone in for a leaner structure by
downsizing the number of employees.

What will be your key focus areas this year?

We will continue to focus on the inkjet printer segment, concentrating on
both the consumers as well as the enterprise space. We want to expand into newer
markets where products like large format printers (LFPs) are more in demand. We
are also bullish about dot matrix printers (DMP), especially for verticals like
retail in the BRIC countries. In the projector line of products, we are
launching new interactive low priced devices with high brightness quotient. We
will focus on price competitive products for the developing economies while for
the developed economies, we will be offering feature intensive devices.

Finally, what are your India specific plans?

As a company, we will continue making India specific products in terms of
design and pricing. We see increasing potential in enterprise, home and the
industrial segments. Also, our DMP play in the retail segment has been very
good. With an annual growth of 28% overall in India over the last year, I would
expect us to grow our revenue by three times in a span of five years. Coming to
manufacturing, we are not looking at beginning anything from India at the moment
but for the future, manufacturing locally is a possibility given the amount of
intellectual capital available here.

John Jacob/DQ Channels

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in