Exclusive Interview: K. Bhaskhar, Senior VP, BIS, Canon India

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, K. Bhaskhar who heads the Canon India BIS  segment has shared in-depth knowledge about the imaging industry and how the rising demand of Multi-functional devices are expected in the SME segment as they make business processes simple and streamline along with being cost-effective.

What are the recent developments, in the B2B segment at Canon India?

We have been showing consistent Y-o-Y growth in the B2B segment. In the last six years, our CAGR put together is about 10.2 which show a good growth pattern. In 2020, our business has dropped almost 30% lower than in 2019. The reason is that a lot of people are finding it a little difficult to come to the office because of the rise in COVID situation not only in Delhi NCR, but even other parts of India so, they want to be extra careful. Going forward, despite the COVID situation, we will be continuing this in a much better manner- connecting with large customers digitally, rather than physically or personally. 2020 has been a year of change.

Where do you see the opportunities for office automation in India, especially post COVID-19?

Industries have started looking for solutions which are going to be the biggest driver. Digitization is perhaps the biggest driver because now we want to have almost all the data in digital form. From 2021 onwards, everybody will start looking into cost optimization. They would like to bring in more technology, be it in the printing technology or be it on anything they have in an office, whether inhouse or not, they would want to cut down the optimized manpower.

In the year 2021, we would see a lot of changes might be happening drastically once we come out from the post COVID situation. Sizing up operations in real estate space will be important as office space will be slightly smaller as compared to what we have been looking in the previous situation. We will be looking at it in terms of what sort of people will be required to work from home and what sort of people should work from the office.

Canon would be looking forward to launching new models that in fact would enable the SMEs to get connected to the cloud so they don't have to invest money on the in-house server and a big IT team will not be required. Even for the large organizations, they will soon see that the Canon solution would bring in more benefits to them in optimizing their IT resources, better than what they are currently using. These new models will get connected directly to the cloud and if they want, they can create some workflow or anything else that they want.

How Canon India helps the channel partners during this pandemic time, in terms of the credit limits, offerings, trainings and schemes?

 After the technology, the most important pillar for our success is the partner ecosystem as they are the pillar of strength for us having contributed a lot, particularly for B2B. It is very important that we constantly support them, even during these difficult periods. We have tied up with various financial institutions so that easy instalments and support can be provided to them in terms of whatever cost is involved while giving back-up and assurance to those financial institutions. Hence, they can easily offer easy EMIs to their end customers, so that, they don't have to block their money in terms of investing and storing the machines in their warehouses. We also constantly give them a lot of inputs on how to monitor the stock situation, so that they should have very good control of inventory. Besides, we constantly tell them to have a check on the collection part, as sometimes the partners do get stuck with the thought of receivables to be collected from the market. We also give little lenience to our partners and we always tell them that when they grow, we grow. Hence, we brought up a lot of attractive things to keep the partners motivated, because a lot of partners were very worried about how they were going to maintain so many salespeople if their business is down. We support their salespeople by creating some small schemes for them so that we can keep up the spirits at a high level.

We constantly educate our partners and teach them how they must protect themselves. We do support the partners by creating some webinars for the end-customers by demonstrating what are the solutions that are available.

What are your plans to support the SMEs ecosystem in India because they are actually facing a lot of challenges throughout this pandemic?

For the SME segment, we'll be launching a few models that are much more futuristic which come with a built-in wireless scanner, serving with the press of a button. It would get stored in the cloud and you can retrieve those documents at any point of time, and you can always create some workflow to that. Some SMEs will be also looking at how soon they can bring back normalcy at this situation, which means, they will keep looking at how do I get the costs and my losses from 2020 covered. These products will also play a potential role in terms of how soon they can connect to the end-customers, how to keep the records that they require and for that they do not have to keep more number of people because this machine can do multiple things.

We are creating a lot of dashboards too so that IT guys sitting anywhere can monitor the machines. All these features which we have been giving on the high-end machines, we have announced that going forward we would start giving it in the entry-level machines as well. Hence, the latest models that are coming from Canon, offer almost all the features of the high-end products, in the entry-level segment. Thereby, we are not only building the confidence of the SME segment to look for a Canon product as a company proposition but also making the partners’ mindset to look for Canon a little more. I would say that we have unique products and solutions to offer to the SME segment as a differentiator compared to the other competitors.

What are the different trends that you are looking at, in coming quarters or coming years?

In B2B business, printing is one of the important elements, and we would like to go ahead and give a complete solution, right from supplying papers, a software solution to output solutions, as part of total document management solution. Giving a 360-degree approach to the customer, we are ready to meet their expectations. We would like to migrate ourselves from a vendor to a partner situation, which means every corporate should consider Canon as their partner for the organization, rather than just being a mere vendor.

What are your different plans to expand, your partner’s ecosystem?

We want all our partners to sustain and grow, we are not in a hurry to add more partners at all, because, most of them have been associated with Canon for a long time. It is equally our responsibility and accountability to make sure that every partner grows along with Canon and they do bring in big profits. We have been constantly working on two things- One is of course to keep profits in mind, profit is very, very important. We work to gain the mindshare of the customers, our end customers and show that we at Canon can be a differentiator as compared to the other products available in the market.