CANON's BILLION DOLLAR MAN

[Anonymous]

http://www.proprint.com.au/InDepth/138873,canon%E2%80%99s-billion-dollar-man.aspx
Canon’s billion dollar man
Quietly
spoken, youngish (yet with two twenty-something year old sons) Canon
Australia’s recently appointed managing director, Kenji Kobayashi, has
the air of someone almost too shy to lay claim to 27 years of highly
successful business achievement throughout the Canon world in Japan,
Holland, Italy, Japan, and most recently as president and CEO of Canon
Hong Kong.

His downunder appointment is a reflection of the
importance the company places on the Australian and New Zealand
markets. His seniority in the Canon management cadres and his
experience in leading management roles in Asian and European markets
has prepared him well for the new role.

In 2001 Kobayashi was
appointed senior director and general manager of the Business Imaging
Solution (BIS) Group within the Canon Asia Marketing Group. He is on
record as having led the group to double-digit annual growth in the
region and achieving profitability in China within two years, despite
not inconsiderable local challenges. In Hong Kong he continued the
subsidiary’s record of year-on-year sales growth for nearly four years.

He
told ProPrint his immediate aim for the Australasian arm of the company
is to achieve the billion dollar mark in annual sales. Challenged to
justify this ambitious objective in the wake of the current financial
turmoil, he confidently projected this to be achievable within the next
12 months.

Service the keyword
The key to achieving the
growth which will make him a member of the billion dollar club,
Kobayashi maintains, is service. He has set his sights on establishing
and growing Canon Australia and New Zealand’s service function, a
reflection not only on his management style of seeking new paths to
profitability but an outcome also of feedback from major customers who
are finding the service function too cumbersome and time consuming to
handle in-house. He sees this very service function as a new type of
business for Canon, one which will overcome the obvious strictures on
sales growth in a constrained economic environment.

Kobayashi
has been quick to recognise the more open-minded business attitudes in
Australia compared with the structured philosophical and more emotional
approach adopted in Asian markets.”The first thing I identified here
was the comparison with the smog-filled atmosphere of Beijing — here
in my Sydney office I can look out and see clearly all the trees and
greenery in the background,” he noted. By that he meant not only to
describe the clear air of suburban Sydney but the clearer, more
open-minded business environment he has encountered coming to Australia
from his posting in China.

This in itself has encouraged him to
take his plough into new areas and carve out new furrows in as yet
uncultivated fields. He recalls that this change of scenario presented
him with the biggest single challenge when he moved from the
established Beijing corporate structure to the totally unchannelled
China hot seat where he was tasked to start from scratch to create a
business framework, not the least component of which was to set up a
totally new dealer network and ensure its efficient operation.At the
same time he was quick to identify the need for a small, extremely
focused direct sales group to service the top segment of Canon’s
customer base. This, he said, presented few immediate problems, given
the high standard of Chinese education and the ready availability of
graduates to fill the ranks of the new organisation.

Doing the right thing
Kobayashi’s
leaning toward clean air and a responsible corporate attitude toward
the environment is well documented. One of the initiatives for which he
has announced support in the short time he has been in Australia is the
Planet Ark cartridge recovery scheme.While he sees ecological
initiatives as an obligatory adjunct to modern corporate management, he
is also sufficiently realistic to recognise the benefits from a sales
point of view of being seen by the company’s customer base as “doing
the right thing”.

After an hour’s conversation with the new man
at the top, it became readily obvious that not only is there a new name
on the business card above the title managing director, but there is in
the offing a new analytical approach in what the industry can expect of
Australasia’s Canon in the twenty-tens.”I cannot simply aim for growth
for the sake of growth,” Kobayashi-san said. “We need to focus on
keeping the company on its present track which, for the future, can be
good timing for adapting to change,” he asserted.

This is a man
whose background and approach methodologies are the product of the
ideal mix of Asian introspection and disciplined thinking and
open-minded European-style entrepreneurialism. Given today’s
constrained economic conditions, his unreserved confidence that he can
keep on track along the lines of Hong Kong’s year-on-year sales growth,
while tinged with realism tempered by the global financial crisis
(currency fluctuations alone impact dramatically on a company which
imports the largest part of its inventory) bodes well for the future of
Canon in Australia and New Zealand.

[Author]

March 4, 2009 at 12:30 PM