At Epson, we have a long and proud tradition of innovation. This goes back to the 1960s, when our parent company, Seiko, was asked to produce a mini printer to print the times of athletes at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Innovation is at the heart of everything we do and is the reason why we are one of the world’s leading manufacturers of imaging technology.
A great example of our commitment to innovation can be seen in the number of patents we file. During the past few years, we have published around 7,000 patents every year–or 20 a day–and we now hold more than 50,000 live patents. This is what makes us market leaders in many product categories and helps us to create outstanding products that add value for our customers. It also ensures the long-term prospects of Epson with all of this new technology being lined up for our future products.
Customer value
Our vision is ‘to innovate to provide products that people want’. Our mission statement talks about our expertise in high-precision, compact, energy-saving technologies. But why do our customers buy from us? What is the reason for our success in the consumer market? I can reduce this to a single word – value.
Our global president, Minoru Usui, sums up customer value perfectly in saying: “Finding true customer value is not simply about answering customer needs. You can only say you have found customer value when the prod- ucts you create actually exceed their expecta- tions. I believe you must first search for the essence of what really makes the customers happy. When you have found what people truly want, you can create superb products by focusing the entire company’s strengths. It’s essential to continually maintain high ideals. If you aim low, then you will never achieve anything worthwhile.”
Engineered for business
Consumers value our products and they value our services. What is less well-known is our success in the business market, even though last year 67 percent of our revenue across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia was generated by business products.
Mr Usui recently identified the business market as a major sector for growth. A major contribution will come from our new high-end inkjet range, which offers a genuine alterna- tive to traditional laser printers.
To highlight our commitment to businesses and raise awareness of what we are doing to support them, we recently took the opportunity to unveil our ‘Engineered for Business’ strategy to end users, channel partners and press at the iconic ‘Theatre of Dreams’, oth- erwise known as Old Trafford, home to Manchester United Football Club, for which we are the official office equipment provider.
The theory
So what exactly do we mean by ‘Engineered for Business’? We mean products and services that are based on real insight, on what customers really want. From our extensive conversations with business customers we have identified four common themes, which are the factors that matter most to them. They are economy, performance, ecology and choice, and form the pillars on which our ‘Engineered for Business’ strategy is built.
Economy means finding opportunities to reduce costs at whatever level suits the cus- tomer – supplies, hardware, maintenance, and document management. Performance is about high-performing products – our Micro Piezo inkjet technology continues to offer more opportunities, such as the WorkForce Pro range, and our 3LCD projector technol- ogy is driving up performance with optimal colour and white light output.
Ecology is about minimising environmental impact and reducing costs. We have an environmental vision that includes reducing CO2 emissions by 90 percent across the lifecycle of all products and services by the year 2050 and we are putting it into prac- tice by helping customers to save materials, paper and energy.
And with Choice, we are supporting every type of business and organisation with carefully targeted solutions and offering a wider range of products than ever before. It is these four aspects that customers consider most when they are thinking about the technology they choose. It is what gives ‘Engineered for Business’ its reality. It offers a focus for the future for both product investment and marketing. ‘Engineered for Business’ is about add- ing true value for our customers. We have confidence in our strategy and we have expanded our manufacturing to meet rising demand.
Future growth
This financial year we have big aspirations. We aim to increase our sales by an additional €200m, and to achieve this we will launch over 100 new products, each one of them ‘Engineered for Business’.
This includes a range of high-end, single and multi-functional printers that has been specifically developed for business, under the new WorkForce Pro sub-brand. It sets new standards of quality, reliability, performance and cost-efficiency. WorkForce Pro offers all the key benefits of laser printers but it also delivers up to an astonishing 50 percent saving on the cost of colour printing compared to laser competitors. It’s a superb example of innovation and what we mean by ‘Engineered for Business’.