Northern Italy


	The Japan Times WORLD EYE REPORTS NORTHERN ITALY

©THE JAPAN TIMES	Saturday, March 13, 2004

Two giants cast a wide net

Konica is known as a copier company and so is Minolta. What can the two offer Italy without stepping on each other’s toes? The answer is segmentation. Konica’s customers usually fall into the medium- to high-end clients who purchase large machines with an output capacity of 100 pages per minute. On the other hand, Minolta holds 65 percent of the market share, mainly made up of private consumers who need printers for home image developing and light work. So, it seems a perfect fit.

Konica and Minolta’s two-pronged attack on both ends of the business machines sector is aimed at cornering the market. And Konica is holding steady at the high end it knows best.

Asked about the deciding factor for Italian customers, Hiroshi Yoshioka, managing director of Konica Business Machines Italy, exclaims, “Price! Whereas in the US or Japan customers are concerned with performance, here they are more concerned with functionality”.

“All the competitor’s hardware is more or less the same so clients find it hard to differentiate between products. Every competitor wants to endow their products with distinguishing characteristics. That is why we are concentrating on the light printing industry. This is a niche market that nobody is looking at this right now and where there is practically no competition,” Yoshioka explains.

Hiroshi Yoshioka, managing director of Konica Business Machines Italy

“We want to provide machines that can print up to 200 pages per minute, collate and staple all from your PC. This is best for companies that produce local papers, brochures, or pamphlets. These machines do twice the work in half the time,” he continues. “No-one else is doing this.”

“As we shift from a volume-based business to an added-value business, people will shift to using high volume machines,” Yoshioka comments, “This means creating print volume. We then earn revenue from our service business. This is the big difference between printer and copier vendors. Printer sales do not imply support whereas copiers do. So copier vendors have an advantage.”

“Our organization is light,” he concludes. “We have 40 people and no direct operations. We move quickly. Our clients and dealers have confidence in us. Our price is a little higher but our reliability is better. We save you money in the long run.”

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