PrintingNews.com

Ask almost any printer today which country constitutes an imminent threat to business, and the likely response is "China!" And while China is indeed a significant factor in the worldwide printing business, both today and for the future, another Asian country looms large as well. That country, India, is typically even less well understood than China, and all too often not seen as a factor in the print industry. That may be about to change.

In terms of geographical area, India is the seventh largest country on the planet—after Russia, Canada, the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia, in that order. However, in population, India is a close second to China, with 1.13 billion people, versus the 1.32 billion in China. And a higher birth rate should mean that India will out populate China in the near future.

Together India and China are home to more than 37 percent of the souls on Earth. In terms of sheer productivity—measured in per capita gross domestic product—both China and India are back in the pack: China ranks 107 in the world, and India comes in at number 154. Thus they are very similar. Both fall in the category of emerging economies. Both consist of a large land mass and a huge population. And while China clearly has a greater manufacturing presence in United States retail outlets, India holds an important, albeit less visible, place in the world of technology.

The Importance of English

Compared to China, India holds a distinct and important advantage. While 30 percent of Indians speak Hindi and the rest speak a variety of dialects, English is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication. Educated Indians invariably are fluent in English. In China, on the other hand, the basic language is Mandarin Chinese. Those Chinese preparing for the 2008 Olympics may be receiving a crash course in English, but Indians have been speaking it since the 19th century, when Great Britain effectively ruled virtually all of what is now India.

A significantly larger proportion of Chinese are literate—90.9 percent versus 61 percent of Indians age 15 or over who can read and write—but Indians have been learning English as a matter of course for decades, while Chinese came to the party only recently. Both countries, typical of emerging economies, have very low labor costs compared with those in North America and Europe. However, India has traditionally emphasized higher education, in a system which yields a significantly greater percentage of engineers and scientists than would be expected in a Third World country.

Graduation rates at Indian engineering colleges have grown at 20 percent per year recently. While the United States produces 70,000 engineering graduates annually, and Europe turns out 100,000, India produces some 350,000 per year—and these graduates focus heavily on software and newer technological disciplines.

Granted, the quality of Indian engineering training is often brought into question, but sheer numbers do count for something. And Indian accreditation agencies are hard at work to increase the quality of education on the subcontinent. Equally significant in the global economy are the 60,000 MBA graduates turned out each year in India.

Testimony to the importance of Indian technology workers to the printing industry is the Bangalore development center, maintained by EFI, where Indian engineers develop and maintain a significant portion of the company's Fiery server and controller line, as well as its Vutek wide-format printers and print business management systems. The more than 200 employees in the Bangalore EFI development group constitute the second largest product engineering group in the company.