Last week Canon U.S.A. hosted an event for press and analysts at their new Melville headquarters. For many it was the first opportunity to see the new digs, a 700,000 square foot building located on 52 acres. Although some of us were expecting a full-blown tour of the facility, what we got was a look at their new 12,000 square foot showroom (mighty impressive), and presentations by Canon executives with an emphasis on high-end production devices, including two products under NDA that will be showcased at Print 13 in Chicago in September.
The majority of presentations were mostly targeted towards press and analysts covering the production and graphics art space. Still, presentations by Canon U.S.A. President and CEO Joe Adachi; Jun Yoshitake, senior vice president, Business Imaging Solutions Group; and Sam Yoshida, vice president and general manager, marketing, BISG, offered the rest of us press and analysts who tend to focus more on the office technology space insights into Canon’s worldwide financial performance as well as future strategies and R&D initiatives.
I’ll avoid drilling down too deeply into the revenue details, but it’s safe to say that Canon remains on solid financial footing with Canon Americas, including South America, contributing to $5.2 billion in overall revenues in the first half of 2013 while the Office Business Group is generating worldwide revenues of $9.9 billion through June of this year.
Adachi offered a blueprint for Canon’s existing and future product R&D efforts, emphasizing how technology used in one product category, medical for instance, may converge into other product segments. One of the current challenges identified by Adachi is how to integrate input and output devices across all the business segments within Canon. What he meant by that, at least in my interpretation, is cross purposing technology used in commercial and consumer applications, creating new benefits for users.
“If we stick only to output devices, unless you have integration with input devices, you’ll be out of fashion some day,” said Adachi. “That’s our challenge and Canon can do that…we can’t stay at the same place for ever, that’s why we want to open the door to the new world.”
One of the more interesting technologies under development, albeit still some years away, is an 8K display. Adachi says that Canon will unveil a 4K display for medical usage later this year, but what that 8K display offers is natural 3D without the need for 3D glasses. “You must understand what’s going on in other industries,” emphasized Adachi. “There are no barriers or walls in industry anymore.”
After Adachi, Jun Yoshitake outlined BISG’s performance in the first half of the year, with 39 percent year over year growth, attributing some of that growth to the integration with Océ. He added that Canon’s independent dealer channel achieved the highest revenue in history of the channel in June of this year.
Key initiatives outlined include increasing copier MIF, particularly in color and high-volume as well as introducing more solutions for those products.
Sam Yoshida highlighted Canon’s success with their imageRUNNER series and pointed out core strategies for business expansion such as focusing on a consistency of architecture across the entire product portfolio, extending the A4 line, enhancing platform tools that will help drive down the cost of implementation, management, and service delivery, and enhancing integration of technology within the cloud, mobile, and business process workflows.
Yoshida outlined ways Canon will execute on these strategies, including completing the migration of the entire imageRUNNER Advance platform to the second generation and expanding the A4 MFP product portfolio as well as through gaining traction on the software front. He reported that Canon continues to see tremendous acceptance in the marketplace for uniFlow, which is driving MPS engagements and mobile printing.
Meanwhile, Canon is looking to capture more page volume in the production arena as the industry moves from offset to digital. The Océ acquisition will be instrumental in helping Canon enter new production print markets and capturing new page volume. Other key elements of the company’s production print strategy is developing products capable of meeting key application requirements, enhancing PRISMA software to drive differentiation and meet customer workflow requirements, and developing services to assist customers in driving net new revenue.
Expect to see Canon leveraging technology expertise in EP, inkjet, and head technologies, and entering new growth markets in the production space such as packaging.
Services represent a huge growth opportunity within the imaging industry and Canon is intently focused there as well. Expect to see Canon build its services operations within multiple business units focusing on areas such as business process optimization, systems integration/IT services, security services, managed document services, imaging and records management, and traditional FM services. All of these services segments are currently significant revenue generators for Canon according to Yoshida.
“It’s all about diversification with Canon,” added Yoshida. “Our copying and printing business is an example of that diversification. We hope many of these businesses you’ve seen will be future pillars of our business. “
Overall, the event underscored Canon’s position as a technology leader, its commitment to becoming even a bigger force in the production space, and how diversification and convergence are the keys to its ongoing success.
Thanks for reading.
