Mark Mathews
Mark Mathews, president of Toshiba America Information Systems, offers his take on some of the trends that will affect Toshiba and the imaging and office technology industry in 2013.
What are some of the trends that will drive your business and the imaging and office technology industry in 2013?
Mathews: Overall we see the core MFP market flat going forward. It’s been a relatively stable market this past year and we expect the same next year with no dramatic changes either up or down. In what I’d call the core market, we see some of the long-term trends continuing, a migration to color. Every quarter our color volume goes up a little bit more than the month before and our document volume continues to shift more towards color. We’re really focused on the office here at Toshiba and don’t do a lot in the production environment. Within our office environment we’re seeing our document volume increase 3-5 percent year over year organically, not through an increase of MIF.
The MPS market continues to be the most rapidly expanding part of our business. It’s been strong in enterprise and during the past year we’ve seen a strong migration into the SMB market, which is prime for the dealers. The highest penetration has been in the enterprise, but now the mid-size market is jumping into it and small business is starting to move into it also.
As it relates to the market being flat we’re looking at other ways to grow the business. For us that’s primarily through a couple of different strategies. The first is our continued expansion into solutions and professional services. One of the trends we see, particularly as we get into these MPS accounts where we take over all the document output, either us or the dealer becomes a trusted advisor to that client, they’re starting to ask about other things, particularly document management/document control.
[Although], we’re not focused on it here some of our dealers have been successful with network services.
Lastly, we’re moving into some new product categories we’ve not been in before. Last year we introduced a new product category—we’ve been selling barcode printers for over a year now and that’s another form of document output in an office and a good and growing business. A brand new one we launched was digital signage and we had a tremendous response by the dealer community on that at our recent dealer meeting.
What are some of the challenges you expect to experience over the next 12 months?
Mathews: The economy continues to be a concern as well as the situations in Europe and China, especially with U.S. companies that do business there. They tend to be hesitant to invest in growth right now. The economy is going to continue on the same path it has been, but the one thing that’s been helpful is unemployment has steadily come down and that will continue into next year.
Price pressure continues in the marketplace and it’s still a buyer’s market. I see price competition continuing and it will become increasingly important for all of us to have long-term relationships with our customers through the use of leasing, and more importantly MPS and professional services.
I expect the competitive map to be the same and we expect everybody to be a player for next year and out there fighting.
What do you have planned to help your dealers be successful in 2013?
Mathews: With MPS, the fastest growing part of our business, we’re making some investments with our back-office infrastructure. Not all of that will be visible to an end user, but it makes us more efficient and better at what we do in providing our services to our dealers and end users. A big part of that is a major upgrade to our Encompass program, where we go out and do the assessment. It will leapfrog our current product and become more of a tablet-based product and allow for a very effective assessment, data collection, and analytical proposal creation. That will be a huge tool for our dealer community.
We’ll continue to support our dealers in the professional services and solutions area. We have some good relationships have created some strong integration with our products and connectors into our products. We have connectors into DocuWare, Lexmark, Perceptive, Drivve, Google Docs, Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange that allow our dealers to tightly integrate those products tightly into those [products and programs]. And of course we’ll be supporting our dealers as always through training and education. We believe in the dealer channel and will continue to invest heavily into that channel in terms of helping them grow as well as recruiting new dealers and [helping our existing dealers] expand.
