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'About 1-3% of a company's turnover is spent on the printer budget'

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DQI Bureau
New Update

K Bhaskhar is the Senior Director of Canon's Office Imaging Solution Division. With 25 years of expertise in various industries, Bhaskhar understands the market dynamics and is well equipped to bring synergies. Bhaskhar has been associated with Canon for over 13 years, working at different profiles in the enterprise domain of business solutions. His key organizational strengths include formation of business strategy, people management, conceptualization and solutions oriented approach in handling problems. In a interview with Dataquest, he highlight the market dynamics of his segment and future plans for his division. Excerpts...

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How would you describe your division's performance and plans for the future?

About 23-24% of Canon's revenues are contributed by my division. Almost 80% of our business is generated from our existing customers. Hence, it is important that we engage with the partners to rake in new business.

The government segment has been down but we expect the growth to be from SMBs, SMEs, and B, C and E class cities. The B and C class towns are offering huge traction. Canon wants to strengthen its channel partner base to cover these mini metros. SMBs contribute 35% while large corporates offer a share of around 40%to the division. For the OIS division we are expecting a growth of approximately 15-16%.

We have been closely working with the government sector for the last 10 years. For the last 5 years consequently, Canon holds the numero uno position in the government segment.

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Last year, the MFD segment contributed 25% and this year it is poised to grow by approximately 14-15%. The laser printer market has slowly replaced the A3 MFD segment.

How has your company been able to shape in terms with times?

When the Lehman Brother's issue was looming large, there was a freeze on all hardware purchases. At this time the CIOs/CXOs were asked to make a huge impact on cost cutting and also ensure that the purchase decisions that they make involve maximum return on investment. At that we at Canon thought what we should do different in order to revive the markets for us. So we decided to offer managed document services (MDS) in a big manner. Furthermore, we went on ensure optimization of print products like the offering that we introduced ensuring anywhere print with an assurance of confidentiality. When we started these services we thought we could make 13-14% savings but we surprisingly made a savings of 30-35%.

In the sleeping mode too there is a rod in the printer that consumes electricity, in our offerings we have ensured that there is an electricity savings compared to other printers in the market. Today we have about 80 accounts of customers for this sort of printers that speak volumes of green technology.

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Any new offerings that you would like to highlight about?

Business intelligence tool is something that we have to offer. This has been offered since the last 2 years. It has been noted that if the printer is attended to in accordance to SLAs then there are less escalation to the IT department. According to a recent market research report, approximately 40% of the escalations regarding printer problems to the IT department have been able to be reduced with this offering.

The focus now is to reduce the consumption of paper. This year we shall be offering services in relation to archiving, records management, scanning documents, etc. There is also a lot demand in the market for such offerings.

Future plans for you division?

Approximately, 1-3% of a company's turnover is spent on the printer budget. Most of the CIOs today are aware of this and are trying their best to optimize this spend. Take the example of banks where there is a huge printer usage which most of the IT departments are trying to control.

We are targeting SMEs and the mini-metros with a unique scheme of ‘pay per use'. The company will be allowed to keep the machine and pay approximately 60 paise per print. If they don't like the machine then they could return it which often does not happen. This model is just like the share cab trick where you can use the cab according to your needs and then pay a fixed amount at the end of the month according to usage.

According to this scheme, a company need not buy the printer but only make payments according to the prints made. This is a sort of support that we have given to our partner ecosystem too. We have identified approximately top 20 partners who will ensure a deeper penetration for the company in the metros and mini-metros. And in turn these partners are spared of payment for one year.

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