Q Printers have become commodity items. What is OKI doing to innovate in the market?
A For average end users, the printer sits in the corner and they hope someone else fills it up. Our technology is excellent, but so are many others, so a big differentiator for us is our three-year warranty. When you start looking into print costs, then you have to factor in support costs and that’s when you really get the benefits of a warranty.
The other area is managed print. Managed print opens up the ability for people to buy printing on a pay-per-use basis. With costs calculated per page, you don’t have to buy equipment or anything else. What people want is for you to manage their fleet of printers for them. We can offer solutions on OKI printers, but over the next few years we’ll manage customers’ whole fleet of different manufacturers’ printers.
If you think of mobile phones, the service is more important than the hardware and service is going to be key for this business too. It allows customers to fix their costs. We can also come on site and tell people if their printers are in the wrong place and work out costs for them. I don’t know where printing costs rank, but they’re probably up there with mobile phone costs. It’s the elephant in the room.
Q How has the recession impacted the business?
A If you look at the back end of last year until March there were a lot of tenders and a lot were deferred and then in spring and summer companies started buying, as they were found it was actually costing them more not to buy.
Q How can you help companies reduce printing costs?
A We spent time with cebr [centre for economics and business research] and the idea was to look at how much UK busineses spend on printing and the cost savings they could make.
We saw massive savings could be made in the how you print, such as duplex printing or printing business cards in-house rather than outside. If you look at savings from that simple application, the benefits of moving printing from outside to inside are immense.
Q What’s your main market?
Most of our customers have fewer than 10 to 15 people; big companies account for less than 5%, so our main market is the SMB space and also specialised markets. Garden centres for example – pot plants need labels and we can print them, so we have a reseller whose main market is printed labels for plants.
Q What can we expect next year?
A Next year, the biggest thing will be managed print and in Jan-March we’ll be making a significant announcement about what we’re doing in this area.
