Fuji Xerox Philippines celebrates victorious year in the business
Fuji Xerox marks 50, eyes 50 more
YOU KNOW a brand has made it into its consumers’ psyche when they start using is as a common noun or as a verb. If you’ve ever been told, “Xerox this document please,” you would know that you were being asked to photocopy something. The brand has definitely captured the hearts and minds of Filipino consumers.
Back in 1965, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. Of Japan signed a dealership agreement with DRB Marketing Corp. to sell Fuji Xerox equipment in the Philippines. This brought the xerography or document copying technology to the country. Nowadays, with technological advances for reproducing and managing documents, Fuji Xerox is innovating to keep pace with such developments as device interconnectivity, mobile printing, cloud services, outsourcing, and instant translation, among others.
At one point, the company focused on copiers for small businesses. But since the Philippines is a thousand-island country, it was necessary to expand the service channels in market coverage as well as after-sales services. In order to respond to the rapidly growing customers’ demands, officials said, the company expanded the direct sales unit by adding channel partners that provide services.
These expansions are useful if, by chance, cases of natural disaster occurs such as typhoons, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes in Philippines, company officials tells the Inquirer.
Hiroaki Abe, president of Fuji Xerox Philippines said that since the Philippines is an island-country of over 7,000 islands, the company wants to widen its network of business partners so that it can provide nationwide after-sales services.
“This was our challenge over the past 50 years, and we continue to improve on this for the next 50 years. By utilizing our network, we can deliver our service to customers. We also know the Philippines is prone to disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons, similar to Japan. With a nationwide network we can provide our quick service if the customer has specific needs,” Abe said.
Looking forward to the next 50 years, the focus on small businesses and printing companies will not change drastically in the future, officials say, even as the company develops business with other customer segments from personal users with mobile phones to corporate-level data and document management via enterprise networks.
With that in mind, the company is planning to offer remodeled products that make use of the digital environment so those companies or enterprises would be able to use new technologies at the least cost possible.
“We are adapting to the widening technology and utilizing our means like moving from analog xerography to digital xerography and enabling it to be linked to other devices. Another thing is online xerography, which means that you don’t need to have a physical paper to be copied as its data is read and it can be reproduced. It also works even in small printing (quantities). Moreover, the picture quality is improved so we are considering of applying this technology in the Philippines,” Hiroshi Kurihara, Fuji Xerox president and representative director, tells the Inquirer.
Also for small enterprises and small printing firms, Fuji Xerox wants to provide color machines that also make specialty prints.
“Not only that, we would also like to provide the latest ICT trends for these machines someday, like being able to link with a customer who want to share information (a document or an image) from a distant place from his or her iPad to a Fuji Xerox digital machine that can do a digital print and send the file to the customer’s iPad. With that, the distance between people is bridged with technology. Depending on the necessity, the files can be digitalized for convenience,” Kurihara says.
This year, as Fuji Xerox celebrates
its 50th year of helping Filipinos copy, reproduce, and manage their documents, the company is already thinking of the next 50 years ahead. In the future, Kurihara said, the company will continue incorporating new trends in technology to printing and working on connectivity of various devices.
Since Fuji Xerox Philippines has reached its 50th anniversary, officials made special mention of recent products such as the Color 1000i with built-in Gold/Silver toner that we want our customers to use.
“While saving a 100 high quality print per minute, this is the first digital printer in the world that can print metallic gold/silver color that can serve as a game changer. As a pursuit to new challenges even in Fuji Xerox Philippines, this is a new ground-breaking product that we would provide,” Masashi Honda, president and CEO of Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific, said. “Adding to the expansion of the office market, one thing is that we are considering the growth of commerce printing market in the Philippines. With the expansion of existing offset printing, color-on-demand activities, we think that the key to this market is to respond frequently on the customers’ detailed requests.”
Such type of printing typically works only with offset printing, which results in high quality prints but entails large print volumes. Presently, digital printing has not been able to reproduce the color of silver and gold perfectly. But Kurihara says Fuji Xerox wants to enable silver and gold prints through digital printing.
“Customers will be willing to pay money for it right? If they feel that they are getting the proper value per 1 print, then of course I think the Philippines and also even other countries will accept this so we are going to proceed with this as high-end technology for printing,” he says.
Working on solutions that work with the latest technology and providing customers with innovative solutions are meant to improve the work process for customers so that they can concentrate on their business growth. Kurihara says that the potential growth of its customers in the Philippines could help the company achieve 50 percent growth in the future.
Kurihara says, “As you have seen it, the core of our sales is derived from printer related revenue. Even for now, it is the case in the Philippines and also same with the other countries, 50 percent of our revenues are office multifunction printers and related services. In terms of revenue per geography, 50 percent of our revenue comes from our overseas business outside of Japan, meaning sales in the Asia Pacific as well as exports to the rest of the world.”
For the past few years, Fuji Xerox has been getting half of its sales from office multifunction printer-related income streams. The remaining 50 percent are the rest like service solutions. When we say services, these services include business process’ procurement of materials, improving the efficiency of the Business Process’ procured materials or supporting the customer’s marketing activity. These are the roles that our company take part on worldwide,” Kurihara said.
Honda noted that the company’s service to the Filipino people are complemented by its experiences abroad, the same way that their experiences here in dealing with consumers helps them better serve customers worldwide.
“Our company’s business is not limited to the Philippines but to the whole world. Since the establishment of our company, we have been aiming for this: to achieve better understanding among men through our better communications. And of course our company proceeded in research and development that would contribute on increasing the efficiency and widening of our customers’ businesses,” Honda said.
Honda said that overseas operations (outside Japan) is one of the growing domain of Fuji Xerox. “Our company is setting forth in increasing our overseas sales ratio from 50 percent to 60 percent by the end of 2016 (by March 2017). Among the ASEAN market, it is indicated that the key to growth in achieving this is the base in the Philippines. With the preparation for inauguration of the ASEAN Economic Market (AEC) by the end of this year, it is considered to be a market where growth is expected,” Honda said.
Abe said the Philippines is also leading the Fuji Xerox global family in terms of corporate social responsibility or CSR, particularly in Asia.
“In 2007, our company took part in the creation of housing in accordance with promoting the system town residents’ independence having the objective of eradicating poverty we constructed “Fuji Xerox Gawad Kalinga Village” in Manila outskirts’ Taguig city. Also in 2014, in order to give chance to the juveniles on the areas affected with poverty to study, our company took effort and partnered together with an enterprise where we printed teaching materials using production printers and started the distribution project. After these said activities, we also expanded and started helping out in Myanmar and Thailand. Under the idea of “CSR is synonymous with corporate management”, we continue our business and direct CSR support as an objective,” Honda said.
Supporting Philippine customers since 1965, Fuji Xerox is thankful to reach 50 years in serving the Filipino customers, officials said. From here on, they said, Fuji Xerox wishes to continue on resolving Filipino customers’ issue and contribute on their business’ growth.