PRINTITRESELLER.UK 39 ONE-TO-ONE As a business, Konica Minolta is looking to simplify what it does to add more concentrated value to its partners and end-users, Michelle Ryder caught up with Chief Revenue Officer Mark Ash, to find out more about the firm’s SimplyFY22 strategy One-to-one with Mark Ash MR: Konica Minolta has been transforming from a predominant provider of print technologies into a digital IT services company, are you looking to leverage existing relationships within the print side to cross and upsell IT services and solutions? MA: Our core business is within office print, and we’ve also been very successful in light production print, and print remains an integral part of our business strategy. However, we’ve all had to adopt new ways of working and that plays to our strengths. Our strategy for this year is to simplify the products and solutions that we offer to our customers – we called it SimplyFY22. We had a huge amount of choice, which is great up to a point. But when you look to scale the business and leverage the customer base we already have, we have to simplify our offering. We’re looking to grow the percentage of IT services and solutions in our business, and we’re well positioned to do that through our acquisition of ProcessFlows, what we will do now is reduce the spectrum of products that we’ve got, and then in Michelle Ryder (MR): In June last year, Konica Minolta announced a number of appointments to the UK leadership team led by CEO Rob Ferris, as a new board what have you been focusing on? Mark Ash (MA): The formation of the new board translated into a change in strategy for the UK business. The key thing for us now as an executive board is to ensure that we’re aligned to Europe and our parent company, so that we can leverage the economies of scale that alignment brings. But at the same time, we have the autonomy to work for local markets, that way you get the best of both worlds. But before I move onto our strategy, it helps to put things into context. I’ve served on four boards now and each year the format is the same, you plan for the next fiscal year and the operating paradigm is largely the same as the year before. However, if you look at what this new board has been through – every single event is a once in a lifetime event. We’ve had COVID, Brexit, supply chain challenges, a factory explosion, and now the conflict in Ukraine. The sheer amount of change meant all bets were off – so actually, the strategy was quite simple. It was that we would harvest our core print business and invest into our other business lines including production/ industrial print and IT services. future years, we can amplify and grow them. If you look at the B2B print market, the thing is that you have a contract with a customer which means you have to deliver value for them throughout the three or five year term. That builds a relationship and trust and provides a platform to build in other service agreements, whether that’s production printing, intelligent video security (a capability earned through the acquisition of Mobitix), content creation and workflow solutions, or outsourced services. Essentially all of the services sit underneath a master services agreement where you look at the lifetime value of a customer as opposed to looking at the customer purely as an office print customer. MR: You’ve been successful within the light production print sector, is this a growth area for the business? MA: We have a strong heritage within the large enterprise and public sector space, but customers in those sectors aren’t typically going to invest in high-end laser cutting devices for example. So, we are investing heavily Our strategy for this year is to simplify the products and solutions that we offer to our customers Mark Ash continued...
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