Wipro Inkjet Printer Plan Hits Tech Glitch

Wipro Info-tech group's plans for manufacturing inkjet printers for the first time in the country has hit the road block following refusal by major players in inkjet manufacturing to offer 'full technology' to Wipro.

Highly placed sources in Wipro told Business Standard that Wipro had initiated talks with almost all major players like Canon, Epson, HP among others for domestic manufacturing of inkjet printers. "While they offered us only partial technology, we wanted only transfer of full technology to us," they said.

Wipro said while leading inkjet players were ready to offer transfer of technology for most part of the inkjet printers, they were reluctant to do so for 'print heads', a highly critical component of the inkjet printer. "Without transferring technology for print head, domestic manufacturing will be quite impossible," they said.

Following revival of talks with Canon last year, Wipro had even planned to manufacture inkjet printers at its Mysore factory with an initial investment of Rs 50 lakh. This was expected to make it the first company in the country as a domestic manufacturer of inkjet printers.

Wipro has a tie up with Canon of Japan under which the inkjet printers are sold in India with the Wipro Genius brand name. This existing tie up was expected to continue for its manufacturing plans as well at its Mysore plant.

Wipro Infotech had earlier redrawn its manufacturing plans for 1997-98 as part of a post-budget strategy following slackening of the MAT restrictions on export-oriented units (EoUs) and other concessions extended to domestic manufacturing sector As an immediate fall-out of the budget, Wipro had decided to revive its earlier plans to indigenously manufacture inkjet printers in collaboration with Canon of Japan. Even this idea was put on the hold previous year following drastic import duty reductions announced in that year's budget which made domestic manufacturing unfavourable. However, Wipro decided to go back to Canon and, 'talk it over once again,' to revive its earlier plans of manufacturing.

The company had drawn up some manufacturing plans before 1996-97, but had to stall all those activities because of the 1996 budget which had made domestic manufacturing unattractive. However, following 1997 budget, Wipro had said it would take up a good amount of manufacturing activities soon. "We'll take it up sincerely and start manufacturing this year," Ram Agarwal had earlier said.

Recently, Wipro and Hewlett Packard (HP) had announced a tie-up for distribution in India of HP's range of laser printers and deskjets.