Asia ready to shift to ‘less paper’ society
TOKYO—The corporate world will not shift to a paperless society, where all vital information and documents will be saved on data servers and exchanged electronically over the Internet or an office network.
According to Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. President Tadahito Yamamoto, there will always be a need to print, store and copy documents, which no company can do without, no matter how advanced business processes and technologies become.
Rather than a paperless world, Yamamoto sees a world of less paper, as the business world steps up efforts to become more environment-friendly.
Yamamoto tells Business Monday in a recent interview at the headquarters of Fuji Xerox here that employees and corporations have become more conscious about the impact of their paper use on the environment as well as the bottom line, thus are no longer inclined to indiscriminately print on paper.
For a company that built its solid reputation on the global expertise of shareholders Fujifilm Holdings Corp. (75 percent) and Xerox Ltd. (25 percent) in printing and copying, this development presents both a threat and an opportunity: a threat because less printing and copying means less sales of its office machines, but an opportunity as well to take its operations to another level and contribute to making business operations more efficient.
Fuji Xerox, with operations covering China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand, prefers to look at the irreversible trend as a golden opportunity for growth, which is why it is transforming itself from a company that relies heavily on sales of cutting-edge printing and copying equipment to a document solutions company that not just sells the latest in printing and copying machines but also helps make other firms’ work flow more efficient.
Fuji Xerox, for example, can study the workflow of organizations and see where the printing and copying expenses can be reduced. It is also pushing for the print-on-demand mind-set so that companies need not be saddled with thousands of copies of printed documents or forms that will be rendered obsolete in just a few months.
Using proprietary software, Fuji Xerox can also monitor the performance of its copiers and printers to alert management to those departments that use too much paper.
“We are no longer just about selling products, but also about solutions and services to help companies become more efficient,” says Yamamoto, who was instrumental in weaning Fuji Xerox away from its reliance on copiers and printers designed mainly for commercial use.
“Three or four years ago, we were still mainly known as a copier and printer company,” Yamamoto says, “Now we are saying that we are a document and communication solutions company that deals not just with texts or images, but eventually voice and video.”
Yamamoto adds that companies usually have a chief information officer, but no document officer. Fuji Xerox can be that document solutions officer.
Yamamoto tells the Inquirer that Fuji Xerox is in an enviable position to take advantage of these changes in how documents and communication are handled in the corporate scene as it is well-entrenched in the growth markets in Asia, particularly China and South Korea.
He projects that Asia-Pacific will lead global growth over the next few years. Its home base of Japan will just be flat, while markets of its sister companies Xerox Europe and Xerox Corp. in the United States will likely languish in the doldrums for some time.
“Asia will continue to grow at double-digits over the next few years and that is a great opportunity for us,” says Yamamato.
Current data show that the conventional business—or the sale of copiers and printers—still accounts for 80 percent of total annual turnover, with the 20 percent made up of solutions and services. By 2013, this share is expected to grow to 30 percent.
Since the machines will still contribute the bulk of its revenues, Yamamoto says that Fuji Xerox will not stop producing a wide range of printers and copiers to suit various customer segments in the corporate world, and it has advanced research and production facilities to keep the pipeline open.
But as it tightens its hold on the global market for copiers and printers, it is also going after the document solutions business that it expects to boom in the not-so-distant future.
