Terry Kawashima discusses the “benefits of staying true to your core market”.
Channelnomics reported that OKI’s European Managing Director, Terry Kawashima, is proud that the company has promised not to get distracted by services, noting that “our direction never changed”. The OEM released new products at its event in Milan and Kawashima, and Kawashima noted that this will “further open up verticals such as graphic arts, healthcare and retail”.
He said: “We have started this journey to diversify our sales into a more office solutions build and professional build, and, although it took us some understanding of the customers’ needs and pain po
ints, I think we have started to gain traction in the development of all sectors in graphic arts and professional print. We have new products and very, very strong market share in those areas; it is getting strong.”
He further stated that OKI’s last financial quarter saw “an 18 percent market share in B2B single function colour printing devices, second only to HP”. OKI is third behind HP Inc and Lexmark in the market, he added, and further stated that it “is growing its market share in both single-function and multifunction categories, identifying Lexmark – which sold up to Chinese investors earlier this year – as a vendor that is apparently losing share”.
Clarifying the Lexmark comment, he said: “We are not especially targeting Lexmark. I don’t think Lexmark are addressing the channel, and we have a strong proposition with our partner programme to attract more channel players.” OKI is not planning to diversify into “service-led management” and will focus on retail, healthcare and graphical arts as well as new products containing embedded management solutions.
Kawashima went on: “Diversification is good so long as this direction of the diversification is relevant to your core competence. There are companies who have expanded the scope of their business far too much and that new business arena is no longer adding value to your core business. That is why we have never defocused ourselves from doing print solutions; that is our core strength. We are trying to add value to increase our range of solutions that we can provide for customers.
“Services are a broader terminology. Companies such as Xerox have actually diversified their business portfolio to include a lot of other things that are really very much far away from their core business, and of course now their business has been split in two. We are not a huge company; we have to always remember our core strength is to provide very high-quality print on a very versatile range of materials; that capability is our strength, so really we need to address our final solutions [and make them] relevant for the customers but that doesn’t mean we have to go towards doing services – something that we do not know at all.”
He concluded that OKI has been simplifying its offering, concentrating more on single-function devices in an effort to add value to particular verticals: “Lots of those high-end multifunction machines scare customers because of their complexity. Making it easy is such an important thing. This is important for us because it comes across so straightforward and easy and that is one of the differentiators.”