Canon India President and CEO, Kazutada Kobayashi, discusses the company’s vision and strategy.
Financial Express reported that Canon has “an ambitious company expansion programme” and has plans to further develop the company in India over the next three years. Kobayashi commented: “In the coming years, we will focus on our retail footprint and on growth across all businesses to achieve double digit growth each year.”
It has been 20 years since Canon first ventured into the Indian market and the company now has 1,000 employees. Kobayashi said: “We started with only few copier machines and now we are expanding into 14 different domains.”
On recreating Canon’s brand the President commented: “We want to expand our product portfolio from the existing domains to new ones. We have purchased new companies in security surveillance cameras and medical equipment. On the other hand, we also want to establish Canon brand as a corporate. Some of the companies in the world are well-known as a company and not just for the products.”
The company President also talked about promoting photography in India as well as its other technologies like smart phones and the printing of the pictures.
Asked his views on Smart Cities and Digital India Kobayashi said: “I think we can be a contributor to the document management system. The digitisation and archiving of existing paper documents is a major issue when we talk about Smart Cities and IT revolution. Our document scanner along with the software will be a way to get these huge stacks of papers with the signature digitalised, and when these have to kept in safe custody for seven to 10 years, digital archiving will ensure these are safe as well as accessible.”
What would be the President’s forecast on mobile printing? Kobayashi said that “mobile printing, hand in hand with a Wi-Fi connection, will be the key issue. We want to make all our inkjet and laser printers able to receive Wi-Fi signals to make that possible. Currently it is 75% but we will make it 100 percent.”
And finally Kobayashi was asked if 3D printing was a reality now and he answered: “I don’t personally think so. It will be difficult to realise it.”