"Canon is putting all its efforts to promote photo culture in India"

Andrew Koh,
Senior Director – Image Communication Products Business,
Canon India

The Indian market is growing by leaps and bounds. Canon strongly feels that India is quite a promising market and offers vast scope. Geographically, India is very huge; at the same time, it is very diverse. Different regions like South, North, East and West have varied culture, varied interests and quite innovative or differentiated trends and insights to discover. 

Keeping this in mind, Canon is making all-out efforts to promote photo culture in India which has started to bear fruit. With even more planned activities for promoting photo culture in India in 2014 and beyond, India could well become one of the most promising markets for photography.

Canon’s DSLR segment in India

Canon’s DSLR business in India is growing at a very fast pace. It witnessed about 30-per cent growth in 2013. As the world’s No. 1 DSLR manufacturer, Canon is playing an integral part in promoting photography and photo culture. While the Digital SLR has been the anchor for the photography industry in India, millions of potential users who want to capture beautiful moments in the best way possible, are also looking up at DSLRs as a gadget of choice. With this in view, Canon is focussing its marketing efforts to see the current DSLR market of 2.5 lakh units double in three years’ time and it is aiming to achieve 50-per cent market share in the year 2014.

Andrew Koh, Senior Director – Image Communication Products Business, Canon India says, “To reach out to Tier-II and Tier-III cities, we are expanding our Canon Image Squares where we showcase our Canon digital imaging technologies. Currently, we have about 107 stores in India, but we have set a target of 150 stores by the end of year 2014 with majority of the upcoming stores planned in the Tier-II and Tier-III cities.”

To further solidify the DSLR category, Canon has devised extensive growth plans and strategy of realigning the brand imagery of moving it from a niche to a mass market category to achieve stronger sustained annual growth to double the size of this market in the next three years. 

To further enhance photography culture in India, Canon recently launched an EOS Academy, conducting free and paid workshops; and seminars on various aspects of photography. These workshops are conducted by a panel of photography experts. Also, Canon India is planning to conduct more than 100 workshops in 2014. 

Another trend emerging in India is that people are looking to create more and more video content – be it of family, friends and occasions, or even students working on documentaries or amateur cinematographers. EOS movie has always been a strong point of Canon DSLRs, which are the only ones in the market that offer as good results and experience shooting videos as they do while capturing still images. This is another group of people whose needs Canon have to cater to. Given this requirement, path-breaking technologies have been included in the latest DSLRs – like Dual Pixel CMOS AF, in the new EOS 70D, and future models would only improve on such video capabilities. 

Globally, Canon is a huge organization with presence in nearly all the countries of the world. With its present monolithic structure, Canon India currently contributes 1 per cent to overall Canon global revenue. However, this is a number that has been steadily on the rise, and the way the market is responding to its products and opening up, Andrew koh strongly feel that this will further contribute to the global revenues in future.

Canon’s Strategy to tackle economic downturn

While Canon sees declining demand for basic point-and-shoot compact cameras, there is still upside potential for compact cameras with more advanced features that smartphones are not able to emulate. For example, superior low-light capabilities and super-high zoom, depth of field that is not possible with tiny smartphone sensors. Canon is also concentrating its efforts on DSLR camera range that is showing tremendous growth rate now. As a result, their revenues have increased with the sales of higher value DSLR cameras.

Plans Ahead... 

The year 2013 was a bit of a mix, but in the end Canon was able to meet the target. The year 2013 also saw Canon introduce a very interesting concept in the market – a DSLR camera with 2-kit lenses, as a single box pack. This was the first time such a “combo kit” has been tried in India. As a result, 2013 ended on an all-time high for Canon India, with a great finish. Given this success, Canon is keenly eyeing 2014 to take it to an even higher level.

Andrew Koh further adds, “Canon would be launching several key products in 2014. Besides some models of compact cameras, we would also be launching a few DSLR models, catering to both the entry-level segment and the professional and semi-professional segments.” Additionally, some key and quite unique lenses would be brought to the market, further expanding the range of EF, EF-S and EF-M lenses. 

satinder@varindia.com