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INTERVIEW
Interview
Epson is famous for its piezo inkjet
technology. Clark explains how
the company is developing the
technology to ensure it continues to
meet customer needs. “Over the last
two or three years, maybe slightly
longer, Epson has been challenging
preconceptions about what inkjet
printing is and is not capable of,” he
said.
In the consumer marketplace, Epson
launched a product called EcoTank – a new
version of which was recently launched
at IFA – with the intention of turning the
business model on its head. Rather than
selling low priced hardware and then
recouping money over the lifetime of the
product through cartridge sales, Epson
charges more upfront for the hardware
(which comes with extra-large ink tanks
containing up to three years’ worth of ink)
and charges very little for replacement ink.
“In the office market, which has
traditionally been dominated by laser
technology, we have taken the high
quality, high precision printhead used in
our commercial devices and incorporated
it into office devices. Unlike a consumer
printer, which has a printhead that
moves back and forth across the page,
our PrecisionCore technology combines
multiple heads in a fixed array spanning
the width of the page. The only thing that
moves is the paper, which is how we can
achieve such high print speeds, and the
quality is assured because we use high end
commercial technology,” Clark said.
EcoTank growth
On the consumer side, the market for ink
cartridge products is reasonably flat, but
where Epson is seeing growth is with
its EcoTank product. “This new business
model seems to have caught the attention
of a lot of people and, so far, we have sold
about 20 million of these products globally.
It answers a lot of the questions that were
asked about inkjet technology and the
inkjet business model,” he stated.
At the start of the year, Epson extended
Rob Clark, Managing Director of Epson UK and Senior Vice President of
Epson Europe, talks about the company’s evolving printer offering
its business inkjet concept to the enterprise
market with the launch of its WorkForce
Enterprise MFPs. “We are very new into
the business marketplace and, to date,
we have been selling into the lower end
of the business market. But now, with the
introduction of the WorkForce Enterprise
series, we have an enterprise-level
multifunction device that will allow us to
take more of that office space. There are
two versions of the Enterprise product, a
100ppm version and a 75ppm version, and
you can specify it as a standalone product
or with a finisher,” Clark explained.
Opportunity in the office market
Clark has worked with Epson for 25 years
and a couple of years ago he was made
Senior Vice President for Europe. “The
target I set myself then was to grow the
business from 1.5 billion euros, which is
where we were in 2014, to two billion
euros by 2020. To achieve that I calculated
that I would need to grow the business by
approximately 80-100 million euros a year.
“I could see some growth potential in
projection and in emerging territories, but by
far the biggest opportunity lay in the office
marketplace. IDC projects that market to
be worth around 38 billion euros in EMEA.
If I can’t generate a reasonable amount
of revenue from a 38 billion euro market,
there’s something wrong,” he added.
Clark said that Epson’s biggest
expectation is that the office print market
will shift from laser to business inkjet
technology. “Because business inkjet, as
well as delivering the same commercials
as laser – cost per page, total cost of
ownership, that kind of thing – has
a strong ecology message, with big
reductions in CO2 and the amount of
waste that’s produced,” he said, adding:
“These aren’t small reductions of five per
cent, 10 per cent; they are significantly
different - a 92 per cent saving on waste, a
94 per cent saving on CO2.”
Interest in the ecological benefits of
business inkjet does vary from country
to country. “Germany is very sensitive
to ecological messages, the UK less so.
However, that is changing. The fact that
we can deliver such a big energy saving
has an ecological benefit, but people also
recognise that it will help them reduce
their energy bills. If you’ve got one printer,
Rob Clark
Epson WorkForce
Enterprise with
finisher
