Looking Forward in the New Year

When we look forward to the next 12 months, the biggest challenge for technology providers in the imaging industry will be to adapt to a changing market landscape. In the past few years, the office technology business has continued to evolve to encompass all solutions and services that focus on documents. This includes print and production print as well as content management, workflow, mobile, social and the cloud.   Over the next few years, customers will continue to seek out providers that can deliver the solutions and services required to meet all of their document needs, and we would like to be on the cutting edge of that need.

We see a lot of growth opportunities for Konica Minolta in 2014 as a result of our strategy to transform from a hardware-only provider to a company that provides solutions, services and hardware as part of its total package.  By expanding our EnvisionIT platform into new vertical markets, growing our software portfolio and investing in IT services, we are now able to offer multiple vertical customers a complete solution for managing their document needs, whether it is in printing, workflow or cloud-based document storage.

In 2013, we launched and then expanded our bizhub MarketPlace applications. We plan to move more quickly on this in 2014 and truly gain momentum for our bizhub apps. We also standardized all of our MFPs so that they have common accessories that are universal throughout the line and new features such as an easy-to-use touch panel control. This standardization will continue throughout the line in 2014 with the launch of our new A4 printers early in the year. Throughout the year, we will be launching a new print production color line as well as a high speed monochrome transactional printer. Finally, we are rolling out our Optimized Print Services (OPS) Enterprise Edition this year. This upgrade of our existing OPS program will have additional functionality on top of our current OPS managed print services and will align perfectly with the industry trend in workflow and mobile printing.

In 2014, we believe that the most successful businesses will be those that adopt a document-centered business model, specialize their vertical market expertise, hire the right employees and work towards new ways to serve the customers.  Our customers can count on us to be on the cutting edge to make this happen.