It appears to be a double bliss for India – with the growing popularity of digitally-printed wedding albums. Lior Meron of InfoTrends has revealed some amazing facts. Christel Lee from Print World Asia reports.
A research showed a whopping 12,000 weddings take place daily, and clocked some 1.5million photographs taken by this number of matrimonial processions. These unions are seemingly a major driving force for multiple wedding albums and photography merchandise.
Indians are known to be extravagant at weddings. It's been said as much as 20% of accumulated lifetime wealth is spent on weddings. Theme weddings turn out to be the icing on the cake for those who want to document the joyous occasion.
Many players have gone into the wedding market, which poses a good opportunity for printers to cash in. InfoTrends quoted an estimate of 11,000 printers offering digitally-printed albums. This market was corroborated by vendors' showcasing of this service at the Consumer Electronics Imaging Fair held in New Delhi last January. Exhibitors included FUJIFILM, HP, Kodak, Sony, Xerox and Zeiss, to name a few.
Interviews InfoTrends conducted at the show indicate that a typical price per wedding album ranges from about 54,000 to 270,000 rupees (the equivalent of $1,000 to $5,000). An article in Business Today dated February 2012 reported that about 5% to 10% of an Indian wedding budget goes towards applications like wedding albums, photo books, invitations, and greeting cards.
The average budget for an Indian wedding ceremony ranges from around 19 lakh (1.9 million rupees or approximately $34,000) to as much as 5.5 crores (55 million rupees or approximately $1 million) for an upper or middle class wedding. Indians are growing richer and this is another reason they are inclined to spend more on weddings.
Some 15 years ago, it was common to spend around 10,000 rupees (approximately $185) on a photo album. Now prices between 50,000 and 300,000 rupees (approximately $900 to $5,500) are not uncommon. (Keep in mind that some wedding albums are extensively reworked with metallic effects and jewel work in addition to the printing.)
An article in the Hindustan Times last July reported that Indian wedding industry is growing at 25% annually and puts the total size of the industry at $25 billion. With the increasing household wealth and more disposable income in India, the wedding market of the country could easily double within the next decade.
Wedding albums and other wedding-related photo merchandise have a huge potential and are one of the big reasons for the success of production colour digital print in the Indian market. InfoTrends estimates that around 60% of the HP Indigo presses installed in India are being used for these kinds of photo applications.
At the recent PrintPack India show in February, wedding albums were a prime application on display, with examples from Canon, HP Indigo, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Scodix, Xerox, and others. Ricoh showed similar examples in an off-site facility during the show.
The opportunity for production digital colour print in the Indian market is accentuated by the fact that many wedding albums today, as much as 70% of the total, are still being produced using silver halide processes. Silver halide, while producing high quality, has a significant drawback: simplex-only output. To make a photo album with dual-sided pages, silver halide sheets must be glued back to back.
This adds a workflow step and increases the thickness of the album with no true benefit. Over time it is clear that more Indian wedding album volume will shift from silver halide to production digital print. This represents another good trend for print service providers in India who have embraced digital print.