The Hindu Business Line : Canon India sets 3-pronged strategy for trebling growth

New Delhi, July 2 Having taken over as the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Canon India Pvt Ltd in January 2007, Mr Kensaku Konishi has set a three-pronged internal strategy to improve work efficiency to treble growth in two years.

“The company in India grew at an impressive 30 per cent in 2006 as opposed to its performance in 2005, which gives us reason to believe that with certain adjustments to the operational and functional systems in the organisation, we could do even better,” said Mr Konishi. “Our aim is to treble our business to about Rs 800 crore in the next two years, from our current revenues of Rs 380 crore,” he added.

The first amongst a slew of changes that he brought about was to turn the company from being function-oriented to category-oriented. “Earlier, the company was divided as per the different areas of operations, such as marketing, sales, administration and so on. Now, I’ve changed the focus into individual product segments. So now every product segment that we are present in has a separate sales, marketing and administration team,” explained Mr Konishi.

Second, greater focus on area-wise performance of each segment, therefore each product segment gets an area head under different functions. “Under the revised structure, we have now put in place an area head for each of the product segments. So Delhi will have individual sales head for camera, printers and copiers. Similarly for the marketing function, each segment will have different heads.”

“The popular perception in India is that people want cheap goods. But I found that it was wrong. So now, though we have introduced high end products to our segment, we give them out with value added services that makes the customer value the purchase,” said Mr Konishi.

Loyal customers

The company says that its focus today is on creating loyal customers that would want to come back for more. A reason why the company has set up two after-sales service outlets, which besides giving information and sales services to products, also provides customers with value added products such as extra lenses with professional cameras. “We have two such outlets, in Mumbai and Delhi. The third one is coming up in Bangalore soon,” said Mr Konishi.

On advertising and promotion campaign, Mr Konishi said, “Besides the traditional modes of communication through the media, we have also opened our first showroom, that is based on the tagline, ‘touch and play’. This increases people’s trust in the product. ”

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