I’m just on my way home from a very nice Samsung dealer meeting in Miami Beach, FL where about 150 dealers gathered for their annual show.
We arrived on Tuesday and were treated to a press pre-briefing walk through of the product fair by director of sales and marketing, Eddie Castillo. The room was beautifully set up with their MX-7 series 60-PPM color copier front and center (actually off to the right but first in the line). There were plenty of great solutions and partners like PaperCut, GreatAmerica Financial, Ringdale and others.
Eddie took us station to station learning a little bit about what Samsung has been up to since their dealer meeting last year. I liked this nice quiet personal overview as it allowed us to ask questions to people who knew the answers and were allowed to tell us the “real deal.”
Samsung is rolling out a centralized app store for business apps developed by software companies and even dealers. In fact, they had a dealer on their show floor exhibiting an app they developed that will now be available to all Samsung dealers. The apps are integrated onto the user interface, which is essentially an Android based tablet (Galaxy?).
Next, we got a bit of an update on PrinterOn, the printer management solutions company Samsung acquired last year. This technology is now embedded in Samsung printers and is even being put into the firmware of their TVs and other products, tying into their strategy to support the Internet of Things.
We then spent some time discussing Samsung’s MPS program. They currently have 11 dealers signed up and active and their goal is 50 by the end of the year. That seems pretty ambitious considering it’s already almost Oct. but maybe they have a bunch of dealers in the process of signing up.
We then hit the hardware section of the tour, seeing A4 devices, the MX-7 products and everything in-between. NFC printing is still prevalent and is being expanded to the entire copier fleet.
One thing I really admire about Samsung’s hardware is they don’t take shortcuts. My understanding is that every component and part inside their devices was manufactured by Samsung, giving them complete and ultimate control in the engineering process. Contrast this with literally every competitor who uses components from the competition. One of the biggest names in the copier/printer industry is Panasonic and they haven’t actually made business class machines in years. But open up most MFPs and you’ll see them loaded with Panasonic parts (and Sharp, etc.).
While I feel like Samsung spends an inordinate amount of time reinventing the wheel with this strategy, I’ve spoken to several Samsung techs that came from the likes of Canon, Ricoh and others who say that working on the Samsung products is a dream. Devices are supposedly much easier to service than a lot of other brands and the service times are much faster. I’ve seen this with my own eyes during my Million Page Test of Samsung MFPs.
I had a PM scheduled and my tech Maurice showed up at the end of the day. He got there at 3 PM and had 5 machines to service. I thought, no way is this guy going to service all these machines today but sure enough, I was home by 6 PM and he was on his way back to NJ. 5 PMs in less than 3 hours? That’s just crazy.
The next day’s general session began with a quick welcome from Eddie who introduced Samsung’s new EVP Kevin Gillroy. You may remember Kevin from his time at SAP and HP. Kevin discussed the power of the Samsung brand and reviewed some numbers and the portfolio. He reaffirmed the importance of Samsung’s partners to the crowd, saying, “Samsung has bet the business on partners. Partners, partners, partners.”
Up next was VP of printing solutions Matt Smith, who took the stage to give us an update. Check out the video below and you can watch almost the entire speech. Matt opened up his overview by telling us “Samsung is going to eat our competition’s lunch.” Pretty bold. He actually said this twice during his time on stage. Matt then went on to say that Samsung is going to be the number 5 company in the office arena within 3 years and will be in the top 3 within 5. I love the enthusiasm but this seems over ambitious and I don’t see it happening. I’ve been wrong before (once) so prove me wrong Samsung, prove me wrong!
For Samsung to achieve this they would have to displace two of the top four vendors and I just don’t think they can pass Canon or Ricoh or Xerox or Konica Minolta within five years. How are they going to bypass these entrenched goliaths when you’re not the primary brand for a single large dealer at this time? Talk to me once you get LDi or Marco or POA to dump one of their main lines and replace them with yours.
This brings me to another thought. While their product floor was very nicely done, it was sparse and considerably smaller than what we (and the dealers they’re trying to lure away) see at competitive shows. Samsung demands an ROI on everything and it seems it’s difficult for the print group to get the funding they want to put together a product fair on par with Ricoh and Konica Minolta. But to get mindshare and more importantly to convince these dealers to defect they’re going to need to show their partners that they can go toe-to-toe with anyone.
We all know Samsung is the biggest company in this industry so let’s see some swagger. Flex your muscles. Show your dealers who the biggest baddest brand out there is.
There probably isn’t a measurable ROI on doubling or tripling the expenditures on these events but when you’re trying to prove you’re going to eat everyone’s lunch, it would be nice to have a product fair that blows away the competition. While the rest of the show was pretty equivalent to the others I attend, the product fair just needed more.
Play the game Samsung. Maybe some massive signage showing off your some of your many sports sponsorships would look nice. You have so many things you highlight both as a manufacturer and a respected corporate citizen; there are tons of things you could to do to take your product fair up a few notches. But it all comes down to budget and if you want these dealers to believe you’re all in just like the competition, I think you need to open up the purse strings and show them what you’ve got, not just in the print world but in so many other areas where you’re already the market leader. Flex those muscles.
That’s really the only complaint I have. The hotel was amazing, the entertainment and guest speaker were great and the product fair was excellent, just too small.
Here’s what I did like. The hardware is pretty solid now and the 60-PPM machines have now given Samsung a full line (almost). Still, dealers were asking for something in the 70-80 PPM range and during the Q&A session today when someone asked when are you coming out with this, their response was basically (paraphrasing) “let’s see how you do with these machines, then we’ll talk.”
I’ve been running these 60-PPM machines and they’re absolute beasts. I mean seriously – well done. I’m no engineer but I don’t see why they can’t just speed up the MX-7 engine a little bit to deliver a slightly higher end MFP. Most of their competitors offer 2 or 3 products based on the same engine so why not? In any case, I’m pretty confident they will bring something like that to market but the response didn’t exactly sound that way. Maybe they’d like a “do-over” on that response.
Samsung’s copier/printer group is made up of talent from virtually all of their competitors. Everyone there is from HP or Sharp or Ricoh or Canon and on and on. These people get this industry. The products have come so far in the last few years.
Samsung has hit speed bumps here and there along their way. Their initial A3 products didn’t do as well in the field as they had expected. Samsung acknowledges this and they’ve made significant changes and improvements to the new devices. As I mentioned, I’ve been running 5 of them like crazy over the last 6 weeks and they’re really very good machines, at least so far. I’ve run over 1.5 million pages on the 5 of them including 500,000+ on the K7600GX and it hasn’t had a single emergency service call. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I ran 30k+/day for 3 straight days! They’re unbelievable.
PrinterOn is going to be a huge product for them. Samsung isn’t keeping it to themselves either, they’re going to continue to market it to everyone. If you don’t know much about PrinterOn, check them out. And you don’t need to be a Samsung dealer to sell it. It is truly fascinating technology.
Their embedded solutions and strategy around their XOA Smart UI is as solid as anyone’s and probably better. Using the Android system makes it easier for developers to work with and more importantly, it makes it easier for a customer to use because they’re already familiar with that kind of user interface. Over 70% of cell phones are now smart phones and these people will love how the user interface looks and works just like their phone. And us iPhone users will feel the same way. Trust me, I’m using these machines almost every day and the UI is just dreamy.
So here’s my summary. Samsung, you threw a great show. You’re hungry and I get that. You made some bold claims and I am looking forward to seeing you execute. I don’t know if you can achieve these goals but time will tell. Your solutions have come a long way over the last few years and you’re very quickly catching up to the rest of the pack. Your hardware is very impressive from serviceability, usability and robustness perspectives.
Samsung has come a long way in a very short time and I have no doubt they will begin to sway dealers from their current primary vendors now that they have added high speed A3. I don’t think it will happen as quickly as they do but make no doubt about it, Samsung is going to start to pick up their share of dealers that consider them their primary brand. I learned a ton about Samsung this week and I am looking forward to watching them continue their march towards the top.
~Andy Slawetsky