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Published on November 20, 2007

Photo-inkjet printers in the Thai market represent around only 10 per cent of all inkjet printers or about 70,000 to 80,000 units of a total 900,000 inkjet printers this year.

The photo-printer market next year will be around 10 to 11 per cent of one million inkjet printers.

The company has set three main business strategies - marketing activities, continuous new product launches and building and strengthening business partners and channels called Epson Authorised Partners (EAP).

Naoyuki Saeki, president of Epson (Thailand), said Epson's focus is inkjet printers - both single function and multi-function printers - and the company will launch many new products to the Thai market as well as creating more awareness of Epson printers through EAP.

Inkjet printers today are the biggest portion of the printer market with around 65 to 70 per cent, while dot-matrix printers are around 19 per cent and laser printers are around 20 to 25 per cent.

The focus of Epson is to maintain the leading position in the dot-matrix market and become leader in inkjet printers, both single-function and multi-function segments, in the next three years.

The market proportion between single-function and multi-function printers is now around 45:55. This will change to 55:45 by next year and eventually become 60-70:30-40 in 2009.

"In Japan, multi-function or six-colour printers are the biggest sellers, taking around 75 per cent of the total printer market.

Multi-function printers are also known as six-colour printers and the company actually focuses on photo printers which have six colours or more. Epson has around 40 per cent of the market in this segment.  

"EAP will be our key partners to help us deliver the message about Epson printers' benefits. We will work closer with EAP to keep in touch with consumers to increase the number of purchases," said Saeki.

The company will increase the marketing budget to drive marketing activities through its partners along with the launch of new products throughout the year.

Yunyong Muneemongkoltorn, executive director of Epson (Thailand), said the EAP programme was launched just four months ago. There are now around 88 EAPs in 22 provinces. It plans to increase to 110 EAPs in 40 provinces by the end of this year before increasing to 150 EAPs throughout by the end of March 2009.

The company has also increased the marketing budget and will launch many new products in all market segments for government, state enterprises, private companies, education, hospital, banking, retail, and small and medium enterprises.

The company recently launched three new products - the Epson Stylus Photo R290 and RX610, and the PictureMate PN270.  They have self-diagnostic and digital photo correction systems and are equipped with the latest micro-piezo high-pressure inkjet head and technology to automatically adjust the size of the ink droplets.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

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