While it expands its product offering and extends its markets Mimaki engineering is also undergoing an internal transition, so will that impact its professional large-format graphics customer-base?
“Our mission is to understand where our growth
potential lies. We are restructuring our resource to
identify where our new customers may be, investing
to educate them about what digital printing can
offer them, and reformatting our internal processes
and operations to ensure we can benefit from
changing market demands.” So says Ronald Van Den
Broek, general manager sales EMEA, Mimaki Europe,
expanding upon a vision statement for Mimaki
Engineering by president Kazuaki Ikeda back in
April 2016.
At that time Ikeda pointed out that Mimaki was
producing inkjet printers for three segments – sign
and graphics (SG), industrial products (IP) and textiles
and apparel (TA) – and that: “We aim to be at the
top of each of these markets. From here on we will
endeavor to become a truly global company, with the
goal of entering a new growth stage in line with further
advances in digital printing. In addition to deeply
cultivating the TA and North American markets, there
is much that must be done to reach the top position.”
So what has happened in the intervening two years,
and what does that mean for PSPs using Mimaki
technology? Well, Van Den Broek is clear that while
there may be something of a corporate shift in focus
from its traditional one on the SG market to the IP
and TA sectors, the professional graphics market will
hardly be set adrift. “Our R&D focus now is more in IP
and TA where we can see a place for digital to replace
analogue technologies, but the sign and graphics
market has been our focus market and we’ll continue
to develop our offering there.”
More of that in a moment, but lets just be clear how
Mimaki defines its three core sectors because there
are products in each that are of use to professional
PSPs, so don’t let the groupings skew your thinking.
SG encompasses all roll-to-roll printers using solvent,
UV-LED, latex or solvent-UV inks. IP covers the smallformat
UJF flatbed printers up to the large-format
JFX series flatbed printers – all of which use UVLED
curable ink. TA products range from entry level
textile printers like the TS30-1300 to the Mimaki
Tiger 1800B for high volume production, with models
covering dye sublimation ink to acid, reactive and textile
pigment inks.
In the last financial year Mimaki Engineering – listed
on the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section – had a
turnover of 48,331m Yen, Europe accounting for 28.7%
of that, making the region its biggest overall market
(Japan 26.4%, Asia Oceania 17.5%, North America
14.1%, rest 13.3%). Total profit was 2,049m Yen, a
figure the engineering giant does not break down by
region – or by product sector. But there are indications of
where we can expect the biggest shifts.
Van Den Broek reiterates Ikeda’s message that the TA
segment has Mimaki’s heart aflutter. “Looking for new
markets is not a scatter-gun approach for us. We have
people trying to identify markets where we know we can
lead with our technologies, and we do expect to grow the
TA segment significantly.”
Ikeda has been clear on Mimaki’s intention regarding
this sector: “We foresee the TA market will grow rapidly
since the textile print industry has been shifting their
production system from analogue to digital. We, which
have already proposed the total solution (i.e. printers,
ink and software) for digital textile printing and built
worldwide sales network, will lead the TA market. Our
most urgent task is to gain a large share of the market
in North America, which has the world’s largest demand.
In order to demonstrate values of Mimaki products and
customer service, we need to establish appropriate
sales channels that can provide faithful service quickly
from one end of North America to the other.”
So there’s a core focus. Another, as we’ve already
said, is the IP segment, where ongoing R&D will provide
advances that can be enjoyed by PSPs as well as
‘industrial’ users, but it’s also where Mimaki is doing
a lot of market research into new customer-bases and
devoting marketing attention. “We need to educate
potential new customers of our technology and explain
to them what it means for them right through from
design, to personalisation, to product, to packaging.
There are big operations that can benefit, but also there
are many entrepreneurs – printing onto glass or whatever
– that we can expect to invest in digital print technology,”
says Van Den Broek. “We are working hard to reach people, exploring many new exhibitions etc., to get
us into new markets.”
Mimaki’s launch last year of a UV-curable fullcolour
3D printer – the 3DUJ-553 – highlights another
new customer focus for the company, which ploughs
around 8% of its annual turnover into R&D. Much
of that is being funneled into software and ink
development, with the Internet of Things a major
consideration going forward.
Connectivity enhancements are already present
in a number of Mimaki’s print devices, enabling
operators to communicate remotely with printers,
benefit from smart diagnostics tools and receive
instant messages from the hardware etc. Van
Den Broek stresses that IoT developmental work
continues apace, with data the company receives
back from systems in the field being as much a key
R&D tool for Mimaki as it is useful for the PSP using
the printer. “Do we really need to focus on developing
eight-colour machines if we find that most people
only use four most of the time? Which inks are they
using and should we be spending our R&D budget in
the best way possible?” he explains.
When it comes to workflow solutions, Mimaki has
made huge strides – integrated workflows that tap into
industry standard software to reduce training time
and offer familiar workspaces, intelligent firmware
that communicates with the operator, barcode data
that contains print-and-cut job instructions to ensure
output is correctly have all been implemented, and
we’re promised more to come to improve efficiencies.
New UCJ300 series printer/cutters at Fespa 2018 will
have a new ID Cut function for automatic cutting of
consecutive jobs via barcode for instance.
You can expect further acquisitions to also
impact ‘workflow’ in that Mimaki is determined to
offer “one stop shopping for customers in terms
of logistics,” says Van den Broek. “People don’t
want to buy a printer from us and finishing kit from
somewhere else. They want a solution that they
know will work. We will do more acquisitions most
probably to allow us to provide the whole solution.”
Alongside that expansion vision is an internal
restructuring one. As Ikeda explained back in
2016: “In order to remain as a group of innovators
and to fully exploit personal characteristics and
capability of our individual employees, we have
commenced a new group independent profitability
management system (GIPS) to pursue departmental
profitability in small groups. All members of each
group centered on its leader will share issues and
try to resolve them. Through such activities, all
employees will participate in the management and
each of them will have efficiency in mind. Thus, we
are looking to make our company an aggregate of
small fruits like a cluster of grapes.
Asked how that’s panning out within Mimaki
Europe specifically Van den Broek said: “Mimaki
Europe’s key focus area is to implement our new
management system into our organisation. By
doing so, we will be better able to pinpoint and
tackle new opportunities and challenges in a
controlled and effective way.”
And how is the transformation expected to
impact Mimaki Engineering overall, in say, five
years’ time? The response as you might expect
is somewhat corporate in tone: “As a global
company, it will improve Mimaki’s corporate
governance system, accelerate market and product
developments by finding synergies, produce
an effective supply chain, expand and find new
revenue streams, provide greater access to
talented employees. It will be interesting to see
how that will all impact the professional graphics
market.
