Nigeria : Panabiz (Canon) wants Gov. to go After Counterfeit

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Nigeria : Panabiz (Canon) wants Gov. to go After Counterfeiters

Panabiz urges govt to go harder on counterfeit products racketeers
Girish Sharma is General Manager of Panabiz, a leading provider of office automation and consumer imaging solutions in Nigeria. Panabiz is also sole representative of Canon in Nigeria. In this interview with Bill Okonedo, Sharma lists the prospects and problems of the office automation and consumer imaging market and says Canon products are being well received here.

Performance
It’s very early to actually talk about market perfromance. However, if I look at small things like what has been the reactions of our partners? What have been the reactions of the people we have so far introduced Canon to? I think it’s been very good. I am quite optimistic about the bright future of Canon in Nigeria. We are trying to put together programmes and policies that will make sure that Canon becomes the number one imaging company in Nigeria through Panabiz.

Market Share
There are two divisions to the Canon imaging business. There is the consumer imaging division which is primarily your printers and there is the business division, which consists of copiers. We have been selling copiers for one and a half years now, so I can give you some data on copiers. For copiers, I can say that we have, as last time we checked, it was about 27.5 per cent of market share in Nigeria, which is quite good. We are still very new in the consumer imaging market but we will be there soon. We hope to have acquired 10 per cent of the market by the end of 2012.

Industry Challenges
There are many challenges facing the consumer imaging business in the Nigerian market, the most important being that of counterfeit consumables. The challenges with counterfiet consumables are that they don’t just ruin the quality of printing, they also endager the lives of the consumers. But users don’t see it as they have bought fake consumables; they say the printer is not good. You can’t blame the printers, it’s the fake consumables that they are using that have ruined and shortened the lifespan of the printers and reduce the quality of printing.

Solutions
Unfortunately, there is not a lot that we can do, but we are trying to educate our consumers and ensuring that availability of consumables from our end is very good, so that we can reduce counterfeit consumables in the market. Apart from the little we can do, much is left for the government to see how they actually stop this.

Another thing is currently the   import duties charged by the government on consumables are very high and this leads to the inflock of grey consumables into the country while companies like us pay of the duties and levies that we are supposed to pay. That also leads to a lot of gap in pricing. This should be looked into.

Roles
What I am saying is that the government has a part to play while we play our part of educating the consumers on the danger of using fake consumables. The government has a part to play in ensuring that the inflocks of fake consumables into the country is curbed.
Canon Printers?

Canon printers have been newly unveiled in Nigeria but globally, they have been there for long.  Even in Nigeria, a lot of people that we have approached said they already had Canon printers.  So Canon has been in Nigeria in some offices. It’s just that the company has finally partnered with a big vendor like Panabiz in order to penetrate the Nigerian market in a big way.

But if you say in terms of performance, Canon products have proved themselves worldwide. Why Canon is an excellent company for us to partner with at Panabiz is because Canon is one of the few companies in the world that is purely focused on office imaging solution. But all the other brands are not only onto printers, printer is one of the products they produce. But this is not so with Canon. Canon is an office imaging company entirely and printing is a big part of the entire imaging game. Canon is a serious imaging player and if you look at patents and technologies worldwide, Canon has the highest number of patents in the area of office imaging solution.

After Sales Service
This is one of the reasons why Panabiz was chosen by Canon in the first place. Canon saw that Panabiz has what is required to take Canon to where they want to take it to. Why I am saying this is that if you look at our aftersale services; we have a team of over 500 engineers deployed across Nigeria to attend to our customers. We have also had a toll free aftersale service number for a long time. That tells you how dedicated we are.

Training
Panabiz is a company that is run by Nigerians and most of our key positions are occupied by Nigerians. Also, all our branches are being managed by Nigerians. Our training managers have been trained abroad and they have returned home to use whatever knowledge they have acquired abroad to train our other employees in Nigeria.

Computer Village
With our foray into the consumer market which is the printers, we realised we have to get close to our consumers. So, apart from the existing set up in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja, we have also gone ahead now, having realised that one of the biggest markets for printers is the popular Computer Village.

So, we actually realised that we need to go into the Computer Village and as I speak with you now, we are going to open a fully functional sale and services centre in the Computer Village.

Investment in 2012
Training of human resource is not something that you can quantify with figures because it is going to boil down to an entire chain of activities and you can’t really put a figure to that. If you want to know how much I spent on setting up a shop, I can give you a figure.  If you want to know how much I spent on buying tools and equipment, yes, I can give you a figure. But if you want to kow how much I spent on training and human resource development, there is no figure to it because it takes a lot sending people abroad for training and ensuring that they get the best of Canon trainers to actually train them.

Employment Opportunities
Two things will be happening: there is going to be direct employment in that we employ people to run our service centres. But if you go to the Computer Village, you will see people running small shops repairing all sorts of things from mobile phones to computers and copiers. So, that figure is going to grow through indirect employment. Though I can’t give you a figure as to what the direct employment will be, but by 2015, we are going to have 250 engineers just for the printer business alone.

Quality of Product
Am not sure this argument will hold water for any vendor that deals in reputable brands of technology. You of curse have the so called Chineese which could be manipulated in terms of quality. But when you look at brands like Canon and other stromg brands that have names to protect, I don’t think they will do that. Even if a company says: ‘please downgrade your quality’, Canon will say no.  They have an image and a reputation to protect.

Factory in Nigeria
Frankly speaking, we had professionals from Canon in Nigeria few weeks ago and this was one of the things we discussed. Canon needs a minimum quantity. The company needs Panabiz to get to a level of sales. And once we reach that level, it makes sense to have a factory here, considering the infrastructure cost ofn setting up factories in Nigeria. So, we are ready for them but this is one discussion we had already started with Canon and we hope that we will set up a factory in Nigeria.

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March 27, 2012 at 8:27 AM