From the printing presses to 3D printing, printers have travelled a long way. Digital printers like inkjet and Multifunctional have already started to revolutionize the world but the growing need for a quality product in dynamic technology is something that the printer industry needs to focus on. Digital transformation has led people to go digital from reading news on the mobile screen to reading a book using kindle.

The printing industry in India has an annual growth of 12 percent per annum, comprising more than 25,000 big small and medium printing companies. The total annual turnover of the industry in the country is more than $11 billion. The demands of Inkjet printer or digital printer in the society have led the growth of the industry. Inkjet printer provides low cost of printing, high printing volume, and low maintenance than the other printers. According to an IDC report, Inkjet shipments grew by 30.6 percent with a combination of 48.1 percent to the overall India HCP market.  

Although the industry is growing at a steady pace, there is a requirement of innovative solutions and business models to sustain the growth in an agile environment. To compete in the proliferating market key vendors have come up with a solution that allows consumers to print a copy of document wirelessly through any wireless device like mobile or tablet so that users would not have to use their personal computers to take digital print it.    

Many vendors are focusing on the segments where printers are commonly used like corporate segment and households segment. The largest vendor in India, HP has developed a voice control printer that supports Cortana, Google Assistant and Alexa. The voice assistances implemented in the printer has different capabilities and can be used to print Soduku puzzles or bingo cards, to-do lists or shopping list, coloring pages and even a graph paper, blank calendar. 

“Connecting printers with voice assistants is convenient and useful though, in the future, HP printers will likely be responsive to voice on their own,” said Anneliese Olson, HP’s head of Home printing. For busy families, the virtual assistance ecosystem makes a lot of sense and connecting a printer to it is a natural extension within the smart home.

The printing industry has already started to boom and so has the competition. If the printer manufacturers wanted to stay in the competition, they have to learn the implementation of the cutting edge technology into their products and also be able to build new printing solutions and services as per the growing customer expectations.