US-based print solutions provider ABC Imaging is expanding globally having set up a 30,000 sqft facility in Dubai Production City. Medi Falsafi, president and CEO, ABC Imaging, explains the growth opportunity in the UAE and Middle East and how ABC differentiates itself in the market.
What is ABC Imaging’s market opportunity in the UAE?
We observed that the major brand owners and agencies in the UAE relied on multiple suppliers for their various printing requirements. The printed products sourced from various companies differ from each other in quality, price, and timeliness. As a result of inconsistencies in printing processes, customer service, delivery and so on, print customers don’t fully trust in any single print service provider.Some big companies have attempted to address these issues by operating their own in-house printing divisions, but they have failed because printing is not their core competency and they lack the focus and resources to manage or expand in-house printing divisions successfully. We have identified the market opportunity to offer a one-stop solution and service for all kinds of printing requirements at highly competitive prices.
What is the company’s core competency?
Our competency is providing total print solutions. We have the resources to handle all kinds of printing requests as per the annual marketing plan of a company. We are deeply involved in our clients’ businesses and we understand their long-term goals. As a result, we work as an extension of their departments with staff dedicated to serve each client. We provide a seamless experience around printing with efficiency and quality that our clients do not have to worry about it at all. Our mission statement is to impress every client every time.
Who are your biggest customers and how do you retain them?
Some of our biggest clients in the US are large retail chains. They run frequent marketing campaigns during seasons, festivals, holidays, and other occasions. We are their single point of contact for all printing and distribution whenever they need to communicate a new message in their stores spread across the country. Therefore, it is critical that our services are available 24/7 and our systems and processes are secure in order to ensure efficiency, quality, and timely delivery. We ensure this through the processes created to manage jobs from the time they are submitted up to their delivery at the clients’ stores. We maintain a record of all our customer brand guidelines, number of locations, and printing specifications for each location, such as size, shape, and material which vary with each store. The customer just needs to place an order online through our portals and we take of the rest. To serve our big clients better, we appoint our employees in their offices to manage their demand with the support of our local customer service and IT departments.We retain our customers by exceeding their expectations every time. As a result, they prefer to continue working with us and we enter into long-term agreements with them.
How are you differentiating your services in the UAE?
In the UAE, we have three business divisions – reprographics, scanning and archiving, and grand format graphics. We have been offering printing, scanning, and archiving services to law firms for the past two years with great success. We expect grand format printing to be our fastest growing business division because of the demand in this market for billboards, vehicle wraps, and other interior and exterior signage. We are experts in this area, and our services will focus on supply chain efficiency through a seamless printing, fabrication, and installation process to save time and money for our customers. Furthermore, we are investing in in e-commerce to expand our existing portals such as Printingroom.com and Print.dryink.com to cater to the online customer base in this region. We also plan to expand our scanning, archiving, and 3D printing services in 2017.
What are your expansion opportunities?
Our expansion requirements arise from the distribution and logistics demands of our customers. A large number of our clients are global companies seeking better distribution services for all their branches and stores around the world. In the Middle East, Dubai is the logistics hub for the Middle East and also our distribution centre for the region.
This enables us to manage inventory and quality from a single location. We will open new distribution centres in other Middle Eastern countries only when we can deliver the same standards of quality through local partners and workforce. We have plans to open a distribution centre in Oman. As we expand in Asia, we will cater to the East Asia market through our distribution centres in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the future.
