Canon Goes Full Steam with Regional Expansion by Opening Canon Saudi Arabia

ME Printer speaks to Shadi Bakhour, the B2B Business Unit Director at Canon Middle East, about the company’s regional expansion into Saudi Arabia and the technology and market trends currently prevalent in the region.

How was 2017 for the company? What opportunities and challenges did it present?
The year 2017 has been a transformational one for Canon as we have moved beyond the traditional elements of imaging and focused our efforts towards innovation, agility and solution-driven approaches that benefit our customers and have a positive impact. We are shifting from merely delivering and driving products to the business sector, to ensuing customer-centricity via offering a hub of solutions that are tailored to suit their operational models and maximize their returns on investment.

Exploring the changing world of business and data, we are always determined to help customers address their challenges, improve their business and differentiate themselves. Canon’s new value proposition was developed in response to rapid market change and the rise of digitized working spaces.

As a part of our strategy of working closely with customers, Canon unveiled its very first Innovation Center in the Middle East region in Dubai, this year. It provides businesses and other entities with a live demonstration of all of Canon’s latest hardware and software technologies. Canon’s full range of business solutions are on display and can be tested as they would in any office or warehouse environment. It also assists in offering a manageable system while assuring cost saving, added security, and opening new communications scenarios for end-consumers.

What sort of technology and market trends did you experience on the market?
Changing customer preferences, increased mobility, and technological change is reshaping the print industry. For more than a century, the world of commercial print was all about offset. While offset presses still account for a significant portion of the print volume, it can’t be denied that the tide of the market is beginning to drift in the direction of digital printing. Vast improvements in the quality and speed of digital systems have opened the door for print service providers to pass along significant advantages to their customers like variable data printing for one-to-one marketing and augmented reality for interactive experiences.

Talking about a market like Saudi Arabia in specific, Canon will be further expanding its offerings across the Saudi market where we see a growing need for digital and other technology-based imaging services. As the government, and other large entities, seek to implement the latest digital business solutions to become more agile, competitive, efficient, reduce operational costs and to adapt to today’s changing business environment, Canon’s suite of products and services address challenges and allow for streamlining of processes to achieve growth through organisation-wide digital transformation.

These services are also particularly in demand with the growing number of small to medium enterprises (SME) that require fast, efficient digital systems to operate. Currently, SMEs make up over 91% of total enterprises in Saudi Arabia, and by facilitating their technology and imaging infrastructure, Canon is supporting The Vision 2030 directive of increasing SME GDP contribution to 35% by 2030, forming the backbone of KSA’s diversified economy

Not only this but establishing a long-term presence in KSA adds value to Saudi economy by contributing to the development of a sophisticated digital infrastructure mandated by Vision 2030; which will ultimately attract investors and enhance the competitiveness of the Saudi economy. The IMF is forecasting KSA economy to expand by 1.7 percent in 2018, with predictions of a 1.9 percent growth in 2019, all of which are good indicators of the transformation and growth the Kingdom is witnessing.

The Saudi Vision 2030 plan emphasizes on building an education system aligned with market needs and creating economic opportunities for entrepreneurs, small enterprises, and large corporations. The Saudi government has allocated $53 billion in its latest budget for investment in education, aimed at attracting significant private sector participation in the sector.

The goal of the vision is to attract and retain the finest Saudi and foreign minds and provide them with all they need. Their presence contributing to economic development and attract additional foreign investment. The strategic objectives of the National Transformation Program include:

• Improving recruitment, training and development of teachers
• Improving the learning environment to stimulate creativity and innovation
• Improving curricula and teaching methods
• Improving students’ values and core skills
• Development of financing methods and improvements in financial efficiency
• Educating students to address national development requirements and labour market demands
• Increasing Private Sector Participation in the Education Sector.

Saudi Arabia is predicted to need over a million new school places by 2020 in grades 1-12, of which 150,000 are expected to come from the private sector. By 2030, the government plans to have at least five Saudi universities among the top 200 universities globally. The adult literacy rate of Saudi Arabia increased from 70.82 percent in 1992 to 94.84 percent in 2015 growing at an average annual rate of 7.72 percent.

What sort of opportunities do digital printing solutions offer when compared with traditional offset systems?
Digital printing offers impressive quality and consistency over other options. In addition to being cost-effective, it is also the ideal method of producing short to medium print runs. It facilitates quick turnaround of small-lot jobs while also providing the added value advantages of variable printing. Variable data printing enables users to change the content of individual printed sheets, and direct mail and in-house production of POP materials and posters, is revolutionizing the printing business, supporting a richer and more convenient lifestyle for those in the printing industry and beyond.

Digital print enables PSPs to be more efficient and flexible, ensuring they can meet print buyers’ demands and take on more complex jobs. This includes finishing and the inclusion of variable data for end-to-end production of personalized applications. As a result, PSPs need to be sure that their work environments are adaptable and fast enough to take advantage of an ever-changing market that predominately wants print-on-demand.

Whether through a digital-only production environment or a hybrid of digital and offset technologies, production workflows that incorporate digital printing technology enables PSPs to take on a wider variety of jobs in different run lengths at the same time. This flexibility can make all the difference in winning business in a competitive market, and digital print can become the core driver in a PSP’s business moving forward.

Is the market moving towards digital print solutions?
In the recent years, digital printing has shown a robust growth, as the demand for long runs is shrinking and short runs and variable printing are becoming increasingly popular. A report from Smithers Pira shows that the region’s printing sector will collectively expand at an annual rate of 8.7 per cent to over $40 billion in market value in 2022 from $26.8 billion in 2017 of which digital, inkjet and toner, the output is set to rise at the fastest rate. Globally, digital printing accounts for 16.2% of the global print market value and 2.9% of the volume. Organizations are increasingly adopting digital printing technologies in response to the requirement to reduce and eliminate unnecessary costs, increase process efficiencies and produce high volumes of printed customer correspondence.

How do digital presses offer new levels of quality, productivity and versatility?
Digital presses address productivity and maximize uptime by maintaining high production speed to deliver consistent throughput, even when working with mixed and textured substrates. With Canon’s digital printing technology, you can deliver professional quality documents with ease and control. Our user-friendly print-on-demand system further provides full end-to-end printing solutions to respond quickly and offer customers a wider range of services.

How does Canon work with its partners and customers to bring forth the opportunities of digital print solutions?
By working in partnership with our partners, the Canon Partner Channel brings together the skills and innovation to develop the power of Canon’s brand, products, solutions and services to deliver mutual success. The company appreciates that partners need a clear path to profit that is competitive with other products and services, product innovation that is competitive in the market, reliable delivery and support for Canon products and a partner with market credibility.

Recognizing the steps to success, Canon strives to make it easier for our partners to do business with them and is committed to supporting partners at each and every stage of the journey from planning to after-sales support. New opportunities for PSPs start with thinking creatively about the equipment, techniques and substrates they already use and then finding ways in which those can meet different needs and for some that may mean adopting an application that they already produce to suit a different market.

Consider, as an example, a PSP who digitally prints branded wall graphics. Using the same technology, they might begin offering customized wallpaper to the interior design market or even directly to consumers. Canon works closely with them to provide guidance and support by drawing on both industry insight and experience to help open up these new opportunities.

What does 2018 have in store for the regional print industry?
The Middle East market has strong potential and we have put together all the right strategies to grow our business in the market and to our vision, which includes enriching lives and businesses through imaging experience. Today marketers are looking at how the customers receive and respond to communications from businesses, and how to use data in such a way that enables each interaction with the customer to be relevant, informative and as part of an on-going conversation.

This is applicable to the entire marketing mix, including print. Variable data printing (VDP) is nothing new, however, the way it can be used with regards to the end-user experience is creating new possibilities. Using clever journey mapping, forward-thinking print service providers (PSPs) are working with customers to create sophisticated documents that ‘do more’ by achieving multiple objectives.

Another prominent trend is augmented reality which helps bring printed images to life through embedded videos, sound and even GPS location data.  The popularity of smartphones equipped with GPS and geomagnetic sensors provides the opportunity for delivering highly contextualized and relevant information to customers, improving engagement and interactivity. We are seeing AR solutions used for catalogues, magazines and signs to make print part of an extraordinary interactive experience.

This year, print service providers will need to reinvent themselves. They must come up with new ideas to keep operations, products, and services fresh and consistent with changing customer communications demands. Print will continue to play a strong role in the communications mix in 2018, where the digital print will assume higher levels of importance as per the customer’s versatile requirements. Wide format printing is a profitable and complementary product offering for print service providers seeking new opportunities and higher margins as signage will continue to play a major role in effectively promoting products and services. Workflow automation is no longer an option but a necessity with the transition from long-run static offset print runs to short-run personalized digital printing is accelerating.

What sort of milestones do you plan to achieve this year?
To start off, we have ticked one of our major milestones for the year announcing the opening of our new company in Saudi Arabia. Canon Saudi Arabia will operate from Riyadh and with an additional two branches in Jeddah and Khobar will be become the company’s largest entity in the region. With over 300 employees by 2020, Canon Saudi Arabia will directly contribute to the Kingdom’s economy and industry diversification strategy as outlined by Vision 2030.

Historically through our direct operations, we have aided governments and organisations differentiate their business by providing simple and effective solutions and outcomes. We are confident that with Ali Zaid Al Quraishi & Brother Co. Ltd as our local partner, this is a further step towards becoming leaders in imaging solutions across the Middle East.

In addition to supporting business achieve their goals, Canon Saudi Arabia has the objective of investing in its employees by enhancing the skills and professionalism of Saudi nationals through extensive learning and development programmes, embracing and enhancing the talent of Saudi youth, and empowering women to further support the country’s Saudisation programme.

Following Canon’s corporate philosophy of ‘Kyosei’ which means living and working together for the common good, Canon Saudi Arabia also aims to establish a strong relationship with the Saudi society through environmental initiatives and community welfare programmes that give back and support various causes. Our strategy in the Middle East is to operate closer to our customers and set up a direct presence in as many target countries in the Middle East as possible.

We are focused on taking advantage of the opportunities generated from societal and technological shifts so that we can continue:

• Capitalizing on the company’s very strong positions in core markets in addition to a greater focus on new businesses and our most recent direct operation in Saudi Arabia.
• Building new digitally enabled, value-added solutions and services, in an effort to enrich lives and businesses using imaging experiences, through companies such as Canon Emirates.
• To accelerate the transformation process by embracing and supporting new ideas and new ways of doing things.
• To benefit from our Partner Excellence Programme and ensure we are not only taking steps to develop externally but also taking the necessary steps internally to transform our organization and complement our future growth strategies.

Building digital solutions and services in the B2B and B2C sectors, partnerships, and acquisitions will form a core part of our strategy for the region. We are also interested in targeting the NVS, Graphic Arts and 3D markets as we see a lot of potential in these.

The Middle East market is growing rapidly and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. We aim to be at the forefront of change and make sure we lead the way, in these domains. From cameras to commercial printers, from business consultancy to healthcare technologies, Canon is constantly imagining new possibilities and redefining what it is to be an imaging company.