The creation of the Canon Professional Print (CPP) division recasts the entire supply side of the printing industry in Australia and New Zealand. The amalgamation of Canon and Océ has produced a comprehensive industry supplier that addresses every level of the industry.
In January, CPP’s inaugural director, Simon Wheeler, fronted the management cohort at the new company and spoke of his vision for the business as well as for the industry. This is an edited version of his presentation.
Canon Professional Print in Australia and New Zealand is the new division that addresses the markets where print is the business, or it is fundamental to the business. Our market breaks down into printing companies of one guise or another, corporate in-plants that are in effect internal print businesses and architect, construction, engineering companies where technical drawings are fundamental to the business.
Today I’d like to explain to everyone what Canon Professional Print, CPP, is, why do we exist, who are our customers, what will we achieve and what strategies will we employ. I will lay out how we will profitably double our revenues in three years, through a strategy of extreme client intimacy. By the end of this speech I want you to believe this can be achieved and come with us on the journey. We need your support.
So the first place to start is to explain where CPP has come from. It is an amalgamation of the majority of Océ, excluding its office business and the major parts of the PPS, LFP and DreamLabo businesses. Summarising last year, the sales of new equipment in the year proved difficult due to market conditions. Despite this the Océ Australia profit level was held at the 2011 position by the stable service results and the strong control of costs.
- What Canon Professional Print is all about - CPP's first director, Simon Wheeler.
The production print team also had a great year, with revenues 10 per cent up on 2011 and a strong profit improvement. They installed 15 colour ImagePresses, 60 per cent of which were new business. Large format grew all aspects of the business performance in 2012, revenue, profit and market share. This was achieved in a declining market, so well done!
The DreamLabo team installed the first DreamLabo 5000 in the world at Pictureworks in Melbourne. After a problematic start the customer enjoyed a largely downtime free pre-Xmas period, when the machine was running up to 21 hours a day. Over 20 per cent of Pictureworks orders now coming from photo-books made on the DreamLabo.
We are now through the integration challenges, we are lean and we are poised for growth. Sincere thanks to everyone who helped us through the integration.
A new era
Now let’s look forward. It is rare that something as significant as the birth of CPP happens in the print industry. It is big news. I am really excited about the possibilities open to us in the new era.
So, let’s talk about print. Contrary to popular opinion print isn’t dead. Print is important. It inspires, persuades and records. It touches our lives constantly and we are much richer for it. Sure, some printing is unnecessary. If print is part of a workflow process that can be digitised then new technologies are replacing it. Who here has opted out of receiving bills? Who here uses a chequebook anymore? And we’ve all heard of the paperless office predictions.
However if print inspires, persuades and records, it has more value than ever. Impact is everything. Our solutions are used by people that care about print, people that are proud about their print.
Whether it’s sign-writer printing banners for Grand Final day on a Canon Arizona; a book printer printing the book that you or I ordered on Amazon yesterday on a Canon ColourStream; a university printery printing examination papers ready for panicking undergraduates on a Canon Varioprint; a family printer manufacturing point of sale marketing material for Myers on a Canon ImagePress; an engineer designing a new hospital with the help of a Canon Colourwave or a photography printer recording a bride’s memories of her wedding day with a digital photo book; they all care about print. CPP is a place for people that care about print as much as our customers.
So this is the why of CPP. Canon digital print has the power to create new ways for printing businesses to achieve more than ever thought possible for customers. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we get up in the morning.
Market size and growth
So let’s look forward. As I mentioned earlier, I believe we can double our revenues in three years. Let me explain how.
Let’s talk about our customers, they are what counts. Without them we do not exist. There are 5,795 printers in Australia with combined revenues of $8.6bn. The top five; PMP, IPMG, Blue Star, GEON and OPUS only account for 18.9 per cent of the total, so it is a very fragmented industry. The vast majority of printing companies are privately owned sub-$10M turnover businesses, competing in tough markets. Many are family run and they rely on their relationships with customers and suppliers like Canon to make money. Our wide format architect, engineer and construction customers are also relatively small companies where technical drawings are fundamental to their business, so the strategy of client intimacy equally applies.
The over-arching theme in the industry is change. Some print is in decline, some is growing, but just about every sector is seeing a growth in digital print technology. Digital print has grown to account for 8 per cent of the total volume of print in Australia, but this is set to grow markedly.
Many printers tell me they will never buy a non-digital press again.
Digital is coming of age and Canon is poised to be one of the key new industry leaders. So there is an opportunity for us to build a renaissance in print. It is a new craft, with new profit opportunities. It is changing and there are new players and new technologies. We are poised for growth.
The growth is not going to be easy. It is a hyper competitive market and in the digital press space we are number three behind Xerox and HP. We need to be number two in 2014 and number one in 2015 if we are to double our revenues.
Enhancing Competitive Advantage
So what’s the plan? For us, in CPP, growth will come from moving our market position to one of extreme client intimacy. We already have a client intimate approach, but we must now make this approach systemic in CPP. I’ll explain what that means later.
Our success will come from our customer’s success, our growth from their growth. Our relationships with them are always either win-win or lose-lose, never a combination. We will grow by step increasing our revenues with enterprises we already know:
Everything we do must make us more client intimate. Every decision we make must be viewed through the filter of does this make us more client intimate as a team? We must be trust-worthy and, importantly, we must learn who in the industry to trust. Trust is the key to any relationship. We must be constant in living the Canon values, particularly Integrity and Togetherness.
We had three of customers at our kick off to tell us what client intimacy means to them. They were Bruce Peddlesden, managing director of On-Demand, the biggest digital printer in Australia, Frank Veltman, managing director of the largest Job printer in Australia and Andrew Smith, managing director of PictureWorks, the world’s first DreamLabo customer. What they told us is that too often suppliers tell them what they can do with one of their machines. The suppliers they deal with ask them what do they want to do and is there any way they can help, regardless of whether there is a sale in it or not. The orders then will happen when they have the need. The selling is still tough, but being trusted is the license to be considered.
Our cultural identity
We will make client intimacy our cultural identity in CPP. We will shift emphasis from a position of customer intimacy based on product centricity to one based on market centricity, from trusted market follower to trusted market leader, from solutions supplier to trusted income generator consultants for our clients.
I am announcing three strategic change initiatives today that are the key to our drive to achieve the transition to client intimacy:
People over process, not process over people. Put simply, process is critical, but only when it supports our people to become more client intimate and help customers grow their businesses.
Solutions to Services. This is about building Canon Print Management CPM. For those in North Ryde you will see an example of this as we will deliver this service to Canon via the ATC. We are now offering full print, print brokering, graphic design, creative and mailing services internally to mirror our offer to customers. We recognise we are in a competitive market with external suppliers, that’s healthy
Finally, experts to networks. We will build on our technical and application expertise to become highly networked in the print industry. We will know and understand our customer’s customers, their partners in the trade and be at heart of the printing industry networks.
We will be creating action plans for each of these initiatives and it will impact our whole business; systems, bonus plans, training, policies and financial reporting. These initiatives will deliver growth. And let me be clear, to be able to focus on the initiatives there will be some areas we will have to place less emphasis on. Bluntly if there is no link to growth through client intimacy we will only apply the required effort.
So we bring all these ideas together in one coordinated message for the market. We let our customers know that we get it. We know they are unique and proud of their print business:
• That they stand apart from their competition.
• That we are proud to work with them.
• That we know they are experts and we respect them.
• That we will drive our growth through client intimacy.