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Students can make copies for free

Some 1 million students attending 100 local universities will be able to use copying machines free of charge by the end of this year under the sponsorship of various companies.

At present, Impress Technology Ltd Corp has installed copying machines at 40 colleges in northern and central Taiwan to provide free services to students, said Luis Lu, president of the company which is based in Taipei.

Describing the free copying machines as a mutually beneficial marketing strategy between consumers, advertisers and the company, Lu said that each sheet of copying paper provided in the machines carries a full-color advertisement on one side from the company’s advertisers, whose target customers are aged 18 to 24.

Lu said the company copied the new marketing strategy from Japan, where the strategy has become very popular when some Japanese college students came up with the idea in 2005.

In Japan, some vending machines provide free coffee or other beverages to consumers after an infrared scanner confirms that they have watched a 30-second commercial played on a screen mounted in the machines, he said.

Lu said that in just the past two weeks, local college students have used 200,000 sheets of the free copying paper.

Tsai Wen-bin (蔡文賓), head of a student association at National Taiwan Normal University, told newspapers that he and his peers have found the marketing idea “very attractive.”

“The only downside is that these free sheets cannot be used to print official documents or reports because of the advertisements on the back,” Tsai said.

The cost to copy an A4-sized sheet of blank paper is NT$0.7 at schools, NT$1 at copying stores and NT$2 at convenience stores.

Taiwan has an estimated 164 universities with a total of 1.32 million students.
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