Sharp Business targets 20% turnover rise

Sharp Business Systems, a 74:26 joint venture between Sharp Corporation of Japan and L&T, is expecting a 20 per cent growth in turnover for the current financial year.

The three year old joint venture, which provides office automation solutions, has posted Rs 100 crore revenues last fiscal.

"Despite the fact that the copier market in the country has stagnated since the past three years, we are consistently growing at more than 15 per cent growth rate," Sunil K Sinha, chief executive of the company told media persons here.

"We are stronger in the northern and eastern markets in the country and stand first in terms of marketshare in the digital printers and copiers segment. In the fax machines, we are second largest selling after Panasonic," Sinha claimed.

The current combined market size for both analog and digital copiers stands at 30,000 machines per annum, of which, digital copiers have a 40 per cent marketshare.

Sharp has a 18 per cent marketshare in the digital copiers market while it has a meagre 5 per cent share in the analog copiers market.

"We are not at all focussing on the analog copiers because, the demand for analog copiers is coming down sharply and by 2005 we expect that digital copiers will have 80 per cent share by 2005," Sinha said.

The company's marketshare in the southern market is very low, because of which it has now decided to put more thrust on this market.

For instance, in Andhra Pradesh, the company's distribution network still addresses the low end copiers and is mainly government focussed, targeting on 15-18 copies per minute copiers.

The company plans to strengthen the distribution network by appointing channel partners to address the needs of corporate customers.