Digital India is a big opportunity for us: HP

Rajiv Srivastava

Technology firm HP sees India as ‘a big focal point’ for its services as it senses enormous opportunity for technology here mainly because the country is heavily under-penetrated.

The opportunity only grows with the government’s Rs.1 lakh crore Digital India project.

“India has got a significant position in any IT company’s scheme of things. It is an emerging market, and provides an enormous scale of opportunity for any kind of technology just because we are so under-penetrated,” Rajiv Srivastava, VP and GM, HP Printing & Personal Systems India, said.

On the company’s participation in the Digital India initiative, he said there was a huge change in the mindset taking place in India, and digital held huge promise of transformation for the entire country, opening up a plethora of opportunities for a company like HP to play a big role.

“…Digital India for us is a big opportunity for us. We have been in great dialogue with the government and have been working with them. We are working with ministries and different departments at the centre as we as state level, to make sure we are proving right level of insights and engagement for all of this to become reality,” he told The Hindu .

The company, which gets 25 per cent of its revenues in India from the public sector, is working with the government for creation for a skills portal as well as conversion of physical curriculum (text books) to digital content (e-books), among others.

Talking about the company’s tablet business, Mr. Srivastava said, “We have seen good uptake in India, which was also the first country where we launched the tablets worldwide last year. In just less than 7-8 months, we have got to a market share which is a little less than 10 per cent. If you don’t get acceptability in the market space you don’t get to this level of share.”

Mr. Srivastava was hopeful that the company would be able to bring the highly-waited HP Sprout — a touch-screen computer that scans objects and turns them into 3D files — to India ‘couple of quarters down the line’.