Citizen Watch Co Ltd has restructured its European arm in a manner more suited to its location, according to Edward Huggins, director of marketing. Until now, it has followed the classic Japanese model of a sales and marketing-manufacturing dichotomy. The new company, Citizen Systems & Peripherals Europe Ltd is a vertical integration of Citizen Europe Ltd, based in Langley, Berkshire and Citizen Manufacturing (UK) Ltd, based in Scunthorpe, South Humberside. A number of sales and administration staff will be transferred to Scunthorpe, in an attempt to transplant marketing culture to the plant, but no jobs will be lost in the merger. The split between sales and manufacturing resulted in a tendency that ne’er the twain shall meet, as Huggins put it. The merged company will begin operations on April 1. Huggins singles out Poland for special mention as a highly lucrative market for Citizen in the near future, along with the rest of eastern Europe, Spain and Portugal. Huggins also previewed Citizen’s products that are being unveiled at CeBit. At the forefront is the Projet 3 monochrome inkjet printer, which uses Citizen’s proprietary piezo-electric print head, giving 720 by 360 dpi resolution. The product is sold in the US for about $200, and Huggins believes its likely low price in Europe will mean that it is seen as an entry-level inkjet printer. This is despite the millions of dollars Citizen spent developing the technology with help only from a very small Japanese company. It has a single-layer head, which costs less to produce and is smaller than Epson Corp’s multi-layer version of piezo-electric technology, but Epson’s Stylus Color printer is a higher-end model (CI No 2,445). Citizen plans to keep the technology to itself for a while before considering any cross-licensing deals. Citizen is also showing a new range of thermal transfer bar code printers. Huggins sees this range as crucial, as it represents a move into the low volume but high margin industrial printer market, which can offset the tight margins in consumer-oriented products. The company also announced large panel Dual Scan Colour Passive Graphic liquid crystal display modules, an Active Matrix Video module based on Citizen’s two-mask Thin Film Diode technology and a four-level drive at the fair.
