01732 759725 28 Q&A Wednesday and Thursday as days to spend in the office, with Mondays and Fridays devoted to flexible or remote working. In addition, digital transformation and more automation has transformed certain processes from a reliance on printed paper to become more digital. Longer term we expect there to be a 15% to 20% reduction on pre-Covid print volumes. That is not a massive reduction, but it is a material reduction. TR: It is still relatively early days for your IT services businesses to take up some of this slack. How much of your revenue is still generated by print? AM: North of 90%. Over time we expect managed IT services to represent the primary driver of growth for us, but we are not expecting managed print services to decline, but rather to be flat. There will be some decline in the print volume and the print fleets of existing accounts, but this will be offset by areas of growth for us, primarily in the public sector. Apogee historically has been underrepresented in central and local government but over the last two years we have secured positions on virtually every large public sector framework, giving us an opportunity to grow with public sector entities in a significant way. And there are still growth opportunities in the enterprise space. In the majority of these cases, the customer is going to a tender and every time there is a tender process we have an opportunity to present ourselves and to present the new capabilities that we have built within Apogee. In the SME space, what we call commercial, most growth will come through acquisition. We did an acquisition early last year and we may still look to get a few acquisitions down the road in order to add to our SMB client base. Organic growth is mostly coming from mid-to-large corporations and public sector, where our primary competition is vendor direct not other resellers. TR: As you have said yourself, Apogee is on a journey. Are your confident of the future and of reaching your destination? AM: It is a very bad moment for a company when it decides it has reached its destination. I’m a strong believer that you should keep transforming and we are definitely transforming our business. This is going to be a multi-year journey. As to whether I am positive and confident about the future, absolutely I am. The kind of transformation that we are seeing in workplaces is a great opportunity, almost a once in a lifetime opportunity. Where there is transformation, there are problems and risks and minds that aren't at peace. We want to be a trusted partner to our clients so that however big or small the problem they face, we understand it, come up with the right solution and then stand behind that solution. That is our commitment to our clients. Sometimes that means we have to say ‘No, we are not ready for that service’. Those are the hardest moments I have had in the past few months because, of course, clients get excited, our sales team gets excited. They want to have everything now, but we need to be rigorous in the process that we follow because we don’t want to mislead our customers by offering services that we are not ready to deliver. https://apogeecorp.com workforce that is able to reach out to any client in a matter of hours. They provide what a client requires, in the past on their printing device and in the future on any IT device. It could be their desktop, their laptop, their conferencing solution, their servers and so on. That is a significant asset. Our network, backed up by support from our call centre to our distribution centre, which configures and moves literally thousands of products every quarter, means that we are able to deliver a solution to a client, wherever that client is and however many offices they have. And in the hybrid world the number of offices is growing in a more than exponential way because the client can say ‘I want 1,000 PCs and I want 100 delivered to my office and the remaining 900 to be delivered to employees’ home addresses’. TR: How have the last two years been for your core managed print business? AM: It has without any doubt been severely affected by everything that is happening in the offices around us. In the darkest days of COVID, overall print volumes of our installed base were 50% to 60% lower than pre-Covid levels. Even now, we are experiencing anywhere between a 25% and 30% reduction in the pre-Covid print volume. There is still less attendance in offices. On Mondays and Fridays in particular volumes have dropped significantly because with hybrid working more employees are choosing Tuesday, ...continued
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