Canon India plans to expand its consumer printing retail network from around 6,000 active resellers to more than 10,000 across 700 cities by the end of 2027, as the company looks beyond metros for its next phase of growth.

“We have around 6,000 active resellers nationwide. But to engage with these emerging potential customers, we judge this is not enough,” Toshiaki Nomura, President and CEO, Canon India, told ET Digital. “Our target is to increase our resellers from 6,000 to 10,000... across 700 cities.”

The expansion comes as India continues to grow even as the global printer market contracts. Worldwide printer and multifunction device shipments fell 7% year on year to 17.2 million units in the April-June quarter, according to IDC. Asia Pacific, excluding Japan and China, was the fastest-growing region, driven by continued growth in India.

Research firm IMARC expects India’s printer market to reach $2.61 billion by 2034, with multifunction devices accounting for 58% of the market.

Canon is building its service network alongside its retail expansion, particularly as it moves deeper into Tier II, III and IV cities.

“We are now developing both sales channel and service channel. That's our key strategy for offline sales channel development,” Nomura said.

Canon’s portfolio spans home and inkjet printers, desktop laser printers, copiers and production printing machines. Nomura said product requirements differ by customer, with inkjet suited to photo printing and laser better suited to sharp text output.

“We go deeper to understand what's the customer's application, desired output, and provide the most suitable product depending on the customer's needs,” he said.

Nomura also wants India to play a bigger role in Canon’s product development for emerging markets.

He said Canon has been bringing R&D engineers from Japan to India to understand local customer requirements, which he described as an “eye-opener” because some applications go beyond what engineers had anticipated.

Canon recently launched the imagePRESS V770 under a “made for India” approach. Nomura called its commercial response a major success and said he wants to replicate the model.

“My great aspiration is to make India as our inspirational ground of technology innovation and make the design centre, India, to be the design centre for all the emerging markets,” he said.

Canon currently has more than 400 active PIXMA Zones and plans to roll out over 500 PIXMA Zone Lite stores this year. Its RetailChamp initiative is also being scaled from around 400 to more than 1,000 retail sales personnel.

On the B2B side, Canon is introducing BizBee for system integrators and value-added resellers, offering training, certifications, incentives and digital tools. The company also plans to expand its System Integrator ecosystem to more than 500 partners across India.

Canon’s office printing business remains a stronghold. It held the No.1 position in the colour, mono and overall laser copier-based MFP segments for the tenth consecutive year in 2025, with a 31.9% market share, according to IDC data cited by the company.

At the consumer end, Epson was India’s No.1 vendor in A4 inkjet printers and MFPs by unit shipments in January-March 2025, according to IDC data cited by Epson. Epson has sold more than 8 million ink tank printers in India and opened its first Indian ink tank printer manufacturing facility in Chennai in July 2025.

Canon India reported revenue of Rs 3,623.8 crore in 2025, up 6.33%, while net profit fell 24% to Rs 82.1 crore, according to Tofler.

For Canon, the strategy is to take printing deeper into smaller cities while building the retail, service and partner ecosystem needed to support that expansion.