Naresh Gupta, senior vice-president, print and publishing business unit and MD, Adobe India said, "India is one of the fastest growing market for Adobe. We have already doubled our investments in sales and marketing over the last year. We might overshoot the $200 million investment target."
Some time back, Gupta had said that India is not an attractive market for selling products owing to piracy. But that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore. "Piracy may not go down in India overnight but any drop in the overall numbers means opportunity. While the Indian market is growing fast, large enterprises are also realising that managing piracy related issue is cumbersome," he adds. Due to piracy the firm earns only a dollar for every $10 spent which makes for a staggering loss of 90 per cent for any company to absorb.
Apart from expanding its India development centre, the company is also focusing on growth from BRIC countries, Eastern Europe and Japan. The centres in China and Romania, says the firm, will be developed as Premier Development centres. "Presently, revenue contribution from emerging markets to Adobe is low in comparison to some of our competitors. Some of our peers are clocking 50 per cent growth from these markets, we can certainly aim for the same," said Gupta.
As for India, Adobe will continue to increase its base among the developer community through its Flash and AIR platforms and see the next growth push coming from e-learning and technical documentation.
"India has one of the largest developer base and we want to be able to cater to them. We are actively working with systems integrator (SI) partners and educational institutes to partner with us," said Gupta.
As for e-learning and technical documentation, the company aims to grow upwards of market rate. "E-learning market in India is growing at a rate of 23 per cent annually, we expect to grow upwards of that number. Since the technical documentation solutions overlap with e-learning solutions, we expect to grow in the similar manner," added Gupta.
Mobile and online gaming is another growth area for the firm in India. To provide a consistent platform for rich internet experiences across television, personal computers, mobile devices, Adobe globally launched Open Screen Project. "For this we have opened our Flash platform that ensures that people can add further value to it. To use this firms need not pay any licence or royalty fee to us," said Gupta. This initiative is supported by players like Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Cisco and others.
