“Our Priorities are Sustainability and Digital Transformation”

Shadi Bakhour, Business Unit Director at Canon Middle East, spoke to ME Printer at Canon’s sprawling GPP 2022 stall, which received overwhelming response from trade visitors. Shadi Bakhour elaborated on the lessons Canon learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, how the market dynamics took a paradigm shift during and after the pandemic, the digital transformation essentials and where the industry headed.

Excerpts from the Exclusive Interview:

The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic upheavals have spared none. What lessons did you learn in these two years? You could have a strategy in place for the future and there was technology disruption and drastic change in business dynamics and thinking of people?

In fact, more than lessons learnt during this period, there was realization that there  were things that you never knew before.  And these things came up abruptly. It affected different people and organisations differently.

After two year since the onslaught of Covid, we are actually interacting with customers. People are wanting to connect again.

Customers are eager to see as to what new has come up in these two years. There was Drupa that was supposed to happen, so also Gulf Print, but all got delayed in these two years. We moved to online and virtual, which proved to be not a good mind connection tool for people.

For Canon, the level of office printing was going down very slowly, but the pandemic accelerated the drop. We saw that large format and wide  format printing and inkjet printing tremendously jumped up during and after the pandemic. This was very evident when we saw the growth of our print volumes that we have experienced with our customers as a  lot of things like stickers and masks have been done on inkjet and printed on large format.

Is there any marked change in customer preferences and how it helped your business?

In our product line, we still have steady recovery in Office. Most importantly, we see that most of the printing presses are more open to hear about investing in continuous feed and digital companies. They are more open to talk about digital transformation, not just a workflow that is digitized,  instead of a workflow that needs to be done manually.

Canon has the largest installed base of high-speed production inkjet printers worldwide, according to IDC. The Canon ColorStream, JetStream, and ProStream continuous-feed lineup is solid, and, along with their VarioPrint i-series of sheetfed presses continue, to dominate the global installed base. However, all these machines largely target commercial printing sector which is stagnant. As you are well aware the growth is in packaging. What is Canon’s plan to enter packaging market?

Everybody says packaging, but I am not saying this. The focus is on retail and large format printing, which is signage. We also see scope in big mock-ups and customized workspace.

Regarding commercial printing I beg to differ. It is not stagnant at all. The Colourstream and JetStream are new products launched back in 2019. Then the pandemic struck all markets were  impacted. Now we see our product line is growing magnificently, in fact at a steady pace. Now we are taking a different leap towards the future.

Digital transformation is the in-thing in printing industry. How is it playing out for the industry?

The change of the market is evident. Digital transformation is important. You cannot live without it, which was proven during the pandemic. We have a lot of products now that are complementing for digital transformation. You just cannot go with one product without having digital workflow solutions that can help build the whole set-up from pre-press to post-press to finished output. From host to host, we need to have a full line-up that caters to the customer needs. Secondly, the importance of environment is quite big. Everybody has a commitment in our region towards the 2030 target of sustainability. And we, as manufacturers,  are building those products.

We hope the awareness of this grows because what we are doing in Canon today is revolving around environment as we have stopped certain product lines because of the environment. Other countries are still selling them, which is not proper.

The new reality in the market is warranting new strategies to sustain the market leadership and innovation drive. What are your priorities for the future?

Our priorities are sustainability and digital transformation. Our first priority for the future is digital transformation; second complementary products and digital workflow; and third is how we can connect our customers and partners with digital printing presses.

Today we are investing in a customer portal in which we have a bunch of verticals and customers and we have the printing presses.

What are the salient features of the portal?

We are introducing a digital portal that connects customers with Canon-certified printing presses for them to get printed leaflets, banners or business cards. They can customise what they want and can outsource the jobs. The customer portal is something we initiated for our Middle East customers, and now have launched the ‘Canon Print Services Portal’ at the GPP 2022 that will connect print services requests with Canon-accredited print press customers.

Companies grow organically or through M&As (mergers and acquisitions). Recently, Canon acquired Packaging converting equipment manufacturer Edale. Do you have any plan for such acquisitions or mergers in the region?

At the moment what we are focusing is how to take care of the customers’ requirements. We have third-party alliances in digital transformation. We have a couple of alliances in the past three-four years.

Print market has witnessed many upheavals during the pandemic, and now technology disruption is rewriting the market dynamics. Is there any upswing?

The recovery has been there since June 2021 and we started seeing some surge in print volume in Office close to the 2019 levels, but not to the full 2019 figures.   In production it has surpassed the 2019 levels. I believe this is because the demand on offset reduced substantially. We see that offset is struggling. Technology today requires mass numbers of volumes to operate profitably. Digital is coming to do this. So it is cheaper, better, faster and more reliable to throw these jobs on digital printing rather than doing on conventional printing.

The general feeling is that there is over-emphasis on sustainability. What is Canon’s contribution and commitment?

Of course,  there is over-emphasis on sustainability. The cartons we use are all recycled.  More than 80% of inkjet cartridge packaging are recycled cartons, and 70% are replaced PET. Canon has reduced plastics used in toners by more than 40,000 tonnes. They are now used and recycled materials. We are as well signatory to the United Nations Global Compact for reducing carbon emission.

We have reduced our product lifecycle CO2 emission by 41.3% since 2008, and by 2030 we want to hit the 50% deadline.

The industry is facing lots of challenges, such as shortage of paper, consumables, shipping cost inflation and supply chain disruption.  How is the printing industry coping with these challenges, and how Canon in particular reacting to the crisis?

Not only the printing industry, but every technology that uses a chip today has been affected massively, but Canon could retain its current customers. Canon has a huge portfolio of machines, so if a customer wants a certain product, we always have alternative for him. This is what helped Canon. Thus we did not lose any customer, instead we actually grew our new customer portfolio. I can proudly say that Canon continues to enjoy the largest market share in Office and production.

Everybody was watching how Gulf Print will fare this time, especially after a gap of two years since the pandemic upset the marketplace. How was your experience and response at the show?

We have the biggest stand, 240 sq metre, at GPP.  It is not about who is big or who is small. But it is about showing our employees, not customers, that we still believe that the printing market space is there, but when you see that you are shrinking or not building or not coming to such events, your employees will doubt why the company is not investing. My employees come first in understanding that we are here to stay and support our customers. Next message is the customer. When the customers walk in they see that Canon has such big stand, that it believes in the future of printing, and has a future for digital transformation for new products. The message is that we came out of the pandemic and we are here to grow.

The registration that happened before Gulf Print is higher than that of the 2019 edition. This was an indication for us that customers and end-users are eager to reconnect, and hungry to see what’s new. We saw the opportunity; we believed in it, fixed the stand at GPP 2022 and invited our customers. To our pleasant surprise, there were 45 Iraqi customers for the Canon stand alone.