Canon Watanabe Hideichi: Expanding Chinese Business Office Market with Color

When a Chinese user refers to Canon, Canon is most willing to let people think of the word "color." When it comes to color, Canon hopes that people's minds can immediately associate their own brand. This is Canon's future in China. Image Kingdom's dreams and goals.

In the imaging field, Canon has a full range of technologies from input, output, and color management. These advanced technologies can be widely used in products, services, and solutions to make Canon a full color solution provider.

In the business office market, color has become an important expression of this visualized era. People gradually realize that the application of color in office can improve work efficiency, and thus put forward higher requirements for color reproduction.

Color will be the trend

Li Shuyi: Canon has always been an advocate of color office. In the future, Canon will continue to promote the color office market development?

Watanabe Hideichi: Looking at the global market, Japan’s color output devices have accounted for 70% of the total office equipment market. In Europe and the United States, the market share of color output devices is more than 60%. In this world that has become more and more colorful, color office is bound to be the future development trend. In the Chinese market, color output equipment accounts for only 10% of the total market, which is a big improvement compared with developed countries in Europe, America and Japan. Canon found that most users in China are not aware of the convenience and efficiency that color can bring to their work. Therefore, Canon will continue to strengthen its promotion and promotion activities in this regard so that users can fully understand the charm of color.

In the company, Canon will strengthen the skills training of sales personnel in the sales of color output devices, while Canon also carries out color day activities at sales stores nationwide. On a specific date of each month, it calls on all sales personnel to actively sell color. Output device. It is worth mentioning that under the impetus of a series of measures, taking the color digital copier as an example, Canon’s current sales volume has doubled over the same period of last year.

Li Shubiao: From the data you just gave, we can see that the gap between the penetration rate of China's color output devices and the world is very obvious. What do you think has hindered the popularity of color output devices in the Chinese market?

Watanabe Hideichi: I think the main reason is twofold. On the one hand, from the perspective of manufacturers, manufacturers are now selling more office products in China in order to pursue sales volume. If they want to take volume, low-priced products or popular products and black and white output devices are relatively easy to sell. In fact, if manufacturers consider issues from the perspective of users, they should recommend more suitable solutions for users rather than simply sell products.

On the other hand, domestic users also need a process to accept color. In developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan, most companies also use black-and-white devices, and then gradually adopt color devices to replace them. The domestic market should also follow this rule. Fortunately, thanks to China's rapid economic development, the markets of Europe, the United States, Japan and the United States took 20 years to achieve the transition from black and white to color, and this time in China should only be 5 to 10 years.

The solution is the direction of development

Shushu Li: Now the role of printers and copiers in the entire office system has undergone a very big change. Before it was a simple output device, now printers and copiers have become an important part of the entire office informatization. You have mentioned on more than one occasion that Canon does not simply sell products, but rather provides users with a complete set of printed solutions. Can you explain Canon's solutions in detail, especially smart solutions?

Watanabe Hideichi: Canon believes that the smart office is reflected in many ways. The first is color, color will undoubtedly improve the effectiveness of communication, improve user productivity, so Canon believes that it is a very important point. The second is to support mobile terminals. Now many of Canon's devices have Wi-Fi, which can support mobile terminals and make users work easier. Once again, information security management, Canon's copiers can expand the IC card printing function, help users to achieve the authentication print, improve the security of the user's printing. Finally, the digitization of paper documents, and now the company has a large number of paper documents, paper documents are neither well-preserved nor well-managed, users can quickly digitize paper documents through Canon's equipment. All of these add up to make your office smarter, easier and more efficient.

Shushu Li: We understand that the proportion of sales of solutions currently in China is not high, especially compared with mature markets such as Europe, America and Japan. What do you think affects the user's failure to use this service? What is the countermeasure?

Watanabe Hideichi: In the past, the needs of many users were relatively simple, as long as they can print. So ordinary output devices can meet this simple user needs. Now that the needs of users are growing, the requirements for output devices are getting higher and higher.

From a vendor's point of view, the competition between manufacturers has become increasingly fierce, and the business environment has become increasingly severe. Therefore, everyone will introduce more differentiated solutions and hope to start the market and stimulate customer demand.

These two aspects will give the solution market a vast space for improvement.

Shushu Li: Just now you mentioned that the solution can greatly improve the efficiency of users. Can you tell us about the examples of printed services and what specific changes have users compared to using solutions?

Watanabe Hideichi: I have an example of Canon (China) here, and we also took this example to advertise with our Chinese users. Previously, Canon (China)’s office had 23 output devices, including 9 color devices, 14 black and white devices, and the number of papers used each month reached 210,000. After importing Canon's document printing solution, the Canon (China) office reduced paper consumption by 27% and office costs by 6%.

It is worth mentioning that Canon's solution supports credit card printing. In the past, traditional print users only had to press OK on the computer and the output device would output the document. After the card is used for printing, after the user sends the print command, the output device will not output it immediately. Instead, the user will need to confirm the identity on the output device before the machine will output the document. If the user finds that there is a problem in the document just printed, the user can directly cancel the print job on the machine, avoiding the waste of paper. This alone can save 6000 papers for Canon (China). Canon's solution also has a very user-friendly design. When the user sends a print command, the machine will automatically clear this task if the card is not confirmed within 4 hours, thereby saving storage space.

We showed the actual case of Canon (China) to many users to demonstrate. Among them, a financial industry user adopted our solution and combined it with its actual situation. This user originally had 30 devices including color devices and black-and-white devices. After adopting Canon's solution, the number of devices was reduced to nine, but normal business was not affected at all. The user’s paper consumption has decreased from 2 million in the previous year to 1.1 million, and the office cost for text and printing has decreased from 320,000 yuan in the previous year to 170,000.

Shushu Li: When it comes to services, I think the service of the solution should be divided into two parts. Part of it is pre-sale services, including pre-sale consultation and project implementation, and the other part is after-sales maintenance. Since Canon has now adjusted its strategy and will focus on the solution market, what kind of preparation Canon has done on the after-sales service?

Watanabe Hideichi: In response to the solution market, Canon made three adjustments. The first is to adjust our after-sales service system so that it can better support the sales of solutions. The second is in terms of service personnel training, Canon (China) has put together a set of training systems for service personnel. The third is in terms of software. Because the solution requires software cooperation, Canon established Canon Suzhou Software Co., Ltd. in Suzhou and cooperated with Canon International (Shanghai) Trading Co., Ltd. to provide Chinese users with more in line with the needs of the domestic market. Customized solution.

Doing product life cycle environmental protection

Li Shuzheng: Canon is one of the companies that passed the Chinese energy efficiency standards certification earlier. Can you tell us about Canon's work on energy conservation and environmental protection in product energy consumption?

Watanabe Hideichi: In terms of production, Canon considers how to recycle products at the beginning of product R&D. Canon designs its products so that they are designed to be recyclable. In addition, Canon's packaging ropes and outer packaging paper shells can be used multiple times to reduce the production of non-recyclable products. In terms of transportation, Canon will strive to plan the transport modes and transportation routes that have the least impact on the environment.

In terms of products, Canon’s outstanding environmental features are very power-efficient. The United States BLI (consumer laboratories) has given Canon's recognition in environmental protection. In the future, Canon will strengthen its work on consumables and machine recycling in the country and make its own contribution to environmental protection.

Li Shukai: Just now you mentioned the product recycling. The international practice is who produces and recycles. However, there are no specific laws and regulations in the country that restrict the recycling of the old products of the company. Canon is not able to take the lead in this aspect. There is no relevant at present. When can we officially implement product recycling?

Watanabe Hideichi: Although there are no domestic laws and regulations that restrict the recycling of manufacturers, as a corporate citizen, it should not wastefully discharge waste or discard old products. China is part of the Earth, so even if the waste is discharged into China, it will have a negative impact on the entire planet. From an ethical level, Canon is obliged and must do product recovery, whether or not there are mandatory laws and regulations.

Looking at the issue from another perspective, if a user finds or sees a Canon printer or multifunction machine that has been abandoned or thrown away, it will also have a negative impact on Canon's brand. This is something that Canon does not want to see. So Canon is responsible for current and future users and is responsible for the entire market.

In overseas markets, the recycling of product consumables is already very mature, and all manufacturers are doing, and all follow the principle of who produces and recycles. There is also a recycling alliance among manufacturers. For example, if Ricoh has returned Canon machines, it will send the machines to Canon. Canon recycles Ricoh consumables and supplies them to Ricoh. Each manufacturer helps each other to do this. Therefore, Canon also hopes that there can be associations or non-profit organizations and companies in the country to do this together.

No matter from which point of view the issue of recycling products, Canon believes this is a must do. However, the Chinese market is relatively large, and from which part we started to work. There is currently no specific plan, but Canon is very confident in doing this.

Reporter's notes

“Mao Zi recommended” to China

As early as more than a year ago Canon headquarters was preparing to send people to China to manage the business imaging department, then Watanabe Hideichi, the chief executive of Canon Japan Marketing Co., was not on the list of candidates.

At a Canon high-level seminar, when everyone talked about sending someone to China to take charge of the business imaging department, Watanabe Hideaki said that this is not where I should go. Seemingly casually speaking, let Watanabe Hideichi arrive in Beijing in January 2012 – the headquarters of Canon China.

For Watanabe Hidedowa, who loves rugby and part-time wrestling referees, the biggest problem he faces is not because of Beijing's more traffic jams than Tokyo, or the fact that Beijing's environment makes him uncomfortable with the discomfort of living. It is language problems. .

In an interview, Mr. Watanabe said that in order to fully understand the Chinese market, each time he went to investigate and communicate with distributors around the country, the biggest problem was that the language was unreasonable.

However, after more than a year of hard work, now Watanabe Hideichi has basically grasped the situation in the Chinese market, and the Chinese level is steadily improving. In the interview, he could already answer the simple questions in less standard Chinese. As the beginning of all things difficult, it may be easier to start.