My trip to Las Vegas for the Kyocera dealer meeting got off to one rocky start when I discovered the day before I was to fly out that my Expedia flight reservation was for 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday instead of 8:30 a.m. I was wondering why I got such a cheap flight out of Philly when I booked it in February. The silver lining in that cloud was an extra day of writing and editing. When you’re a one-man band, you got to love it even if it was at the expense of missing the opening night reception and the schmooze fest that goes along with it. Fortunately, I didn’t miss any the main attraction—the entire Wednesday schedule.

This was the first dealer meeting I attended without Mike Pietrunti at the helm. It’s too early and unfair to make comparisons, so I won’t go there, but this turned out to be everything I expected from a Kyocera Mita dealer meeting and then some, especially the massive amounts of bacon at the Wednesday morning breakfast, a first since I’ve been attending these Kyocera dealer meetings. The bacon thing is an ongoing joke among certain press and analysts who crave that sodium-laden, artery clogging, heart attack trigger of a treat.

My rocky start aside, by all accounts the past year at the newly named Kyocera Document Solutions, Inc. is one that most OEMs would be happy to report. Consider that the company enjoyed better than 10 percent growth in the Americas the past fiscal year. That may not be the 20 percent growth the company was challenged to achieve last year by the home office in Japan, but healthy numbers nevertheless.

Expect Kyocera to place a greater emphasis on vertical markets and managed document services (MDS) while introducing a host of new devices in essence maintaining the hardware heritage that is the foundation of all OEM’s business.

More importantly, the general consensus from the dealers I spoke with was that this was a solid meeting and the messages delivered were in line with what they wanted to hear. To give credit where credit is due, those dealers are no doubt instrumental in the company’s 10+ percent growth here in the Americas. Anyway, I’ll be delving into the meeting in greater detail in next week’s edition of The Week in Imaging.

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