A report has recognised Canon’s ‘comprehensive range of high-speed inkjet production printers incorporating both continuous feed and sheet fed platforms’; its ‘complete direct sales force to cover all global regions’ and its ‘high levels of expertise in not only installations and support but services and business development’.
This comes following the announcement that in its latest analysis of the worldwide high-speed inkjet press market (*), market intelligence provider IDC has positioned Canon, Inc. as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide High-Speed Inkjet Press 2019-2020 Vendor Assessment (doc # US45705519, December 2019).
The study has evaluated and compared both the current capabilities of the key vendors and their future strategies to meet expected customer requirements for high-speed inkjet production presses. Noting that ‘Canon has strengthened its position in its core markets of transaction and corporate/large enterprise print while expanding out into the graphics and commercial printer space…’, the report also references Canon’s objective of wanting to be the ‘pathway to digital’ for the still largely untapped analogue/offset market.
With inkjet expanding downstream – what IDC refers to as ‘the democratisation of inkjet’ – as well as upstream as the market matures, the IDC MarketScape report identifies Canon’s key strengths as:
• The portfolio of its continuous feed and sheet fed products, its ‘excellent’ PRISMA workflow software, and its growing range of inks, stocks and media to ‘address the needs of a large spectrum of customers’ and to produce ‘a myriad of applications’.
• A ‘strong’ direct sales force and service organisation worldwide, together with colour and application specialists ‘to help build its capabilities as a consultative sales organisation’. The relationship that customers have with their account managers is also cited as one of the main reasons for doing business with Canon.
• Canon ‘actively’ helps its customers increase their print volumes and runs initiatives to support moving more applications and jobs to their inkjet presses.
• 1000 production print service technicians, with over 600 of them specialising in high-speed inkjet.
• Manufacturing innovation fuelled by a substantial investment in R&D, with ‘a more direct line from R&D to customers, allowing for a more customer-focused approach and quicker reaction time’.
• Customer events/training held at manufacturing sites such as Boca Raton, Poing, and Venlo.
‘Based on our understanding of the most pressing business performance issues for our customers,’ said Christian Unterberger, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President, Canon Production Printing, ‘Canon’s inkjet R&D teams have focused mainly on four areas: optimising productivity, maximising print quality, expanding applications versatility and reducing total cost of ownership. By delivering outstanding output quality and enabling customers to work with the broadest range of media, they can produce the fullest range of applications for their customers.
‘This means they can transition higher volumes of work from inefficient legacy production devices. In turn, they can also take full advantage of the improved productivity that comes with each generation of digital inkjet technology – not just by virtue of faster printing speeds, but by eliminating inefficient practices and streamlining end-to-end workflows. Together, these advantages have powerful potential to bring running costs down, stimulate growth and accelerate return on investment.’
(*) IDC MarketScape: Worldwide High-Speed Inkjet Press 2019-2020 Vendor Assessment, by Amy Machado and Sharon McNee, December 2019.
CANON SOUTH AFRICA (+27) (0) 12 675 4900 James.DeWaal@Canon.co.za http://www.canon.co.za
