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Samsung to take on enterprise printer market
South Korean electronics giant Samsung said it will now step into the mid- and high-end enterprise-class laser printer market. “We want to enter the business-to-business (B2B) market and we’ll need midand high-end machines for that,” said Shin Hyundae, Samsung’s vice-president of its printer division. “We made a success story out of our low-end laser printers and now we’re focusing on the mid- and high-end printer market,” he said. Hyundae said Samsung plans to double the number of sales personnel who work with B2B resellers worldwide and also introduce a power partner programme for resellers. According to him, the company is on a good footing to take on the challenge as it has its own manufacturing facility and makes its own electronic chips. “We can reduce the product size and material cost with a one-chip solution because we also make our own semiconductors,” he told reporters during the recent annual CeBIT trade fair in Hanover, Germany. Last year, the company placed second in the monochrome laser printer market, first in the A4-sized flatbed mono laser multifunction printer market, and fourth in the colour laser printer market worldwide. “Fourth in the colour laser printer market is a big achievement for us because we ranked seventh just a year before,” Hyundae said. “We are also currently seventh in the overall printer market worldwide and we’ve achieved this without an inkjet printer portfolio to speak of.” Hyundae said the company hopes to climb to third spot by 2010 and plans to do this even while solely sticking to laser printer technology. “Laser has much more advantage over ink so we won’t focus on ink-based printers at all,” he claimed. “It is expensive but we can reduce the price of manufacturing laser printers and make them compete with inkjets.” Higher growth .Currently, according to Hyundae, the average growth rate of colour laser printer adoption worldwide stands at about 20% annually. However, he expects this rate to increase with the dropping price of laser printers. “Last year, for example, the average price for a colour laser printer was US$1,000 (RM3,700). “However, we’ve managed to develop a colour laser printer for US$300 (RM1,110),” Hyundae explained. He also expects more consumers will buy laser printers for their homes as a result of this drop in price. However, he added, there is still some work to be done in bringing the right combination of the machine’s size and printing noise that will convince users to buy them for their homes. But Hyundae believes that increased laser printer adoption is a certainty. “I believe the printer will be the core of convergence in the future. All sorts of devices will be connected and the need to print will rise. “The printer business is a future strategic business for Samsung and we’re really serious about it.
The company has invested a lot of money in it,” Hyundae said.
He also added that the company is investing more in its Star (Samsung Takeback and Recycling) programme which was launched in 2005. “We are expanding it worldwide and have recently opened our recycling centre in Seoul,” he said. According to him, the company is also running the programme in 16 European countries. He said that Samsung is putting in a bigger emphasis on it in Asia but is still studying how to implement the programme properly as finding the right people to recycle e-waste correctly is not easy
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