Toshiaki Nomura, President & CEO, Canon India, is convinced the Indian government’s strong initiative and the ongoing infrastructure setup will kickstart the semiconductor space in India in the next few years. Canon, a player in the segment being a company manufacturing equipment that makes chips, is optimistic about being able to grow with the country’s aspirations in this new segment.
“Since we established our company in 1997, we have seen constant growth, except for the Covid period. This year also we are quite close to double digit growth. So we are optimistic for our business, our core business of cameras and printers, as well as some new products,” Nomura told The Indian Express in an interview. Along with semiconductor manufacturing, Canon is now trying to penetrate the Indian diagnostics market too with X-Ray, MRI, CT scan and ultrasound equipment. It has also established a strong presence in surveillance cameras over the past few years.
“The average income is increasing as well as the infrastructure setup. All these are opportunities for us and our target customer base is increasing,” Nomura explained on why India has become the “biggest attention market”. Canon has had a leading market share of 30.69% in the overall Laser Copier Market in the A3/A4 category since 2016 as per IDC, with BFSI, IT, Manufacturing, Aviation, Government & SMB being the top sectors. The company is foreseeing a 2X growth over 2023 in the Consumer Printers business this year. It is also predicting a 10x growth in the surveillance segment by 2026 where 60% contribution comes from the IT/ITes sector followed by manufacturing, government and warehouse.
Canon is very open to India-focussed products given the size of the market and its volume opportunity, Nomura said. “Even our headquarters in Tokyo prioritises India; it is one of the most important markets from a growth perspective. So they are quite keen to understand what the Indian customer wants and quite flexible to help with even specific features for the market.”
“We have a challenge of geography, though. Our service network is quite broad, but still there is not enough coverage for sales in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities,” Nomura said, adding that with Indians getting richer demand is now coming from smaller cities. “We are engaging with our partners to have a strong channel.”
Nomura said Canon has been getting in its engineers from Japan to see and learn how Indian customers use products, for instance with their printers which are used for various types of applications from what was originally envisaged. “Our people never imagined such things happen… Indians are very creative when it comes to maximising the potential of one product,” he said, adding this is why he believes in the concept of “product for India”.
On the camera side, Nomura accepts that the creator segment is a great opportunity now with the segment seeing high quality images and video. “Nowadays, youngsters start shooting with the smartphone and once they require a high quality image to differentiate them, they upgrade to cameras,” he said, explaining how the camera and smartphone now complement each other. “This is an opportunity for us.”
With the Cinema EOS range, Canon is also trying to make inroads into the largest film industry in the world. Nomura said the focus is on filmmaking as well as broadcasting, and they are working with the masters who the industry follows and is also planning to engage the film institutes.
