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June - 2012 - issue > View Point
Poised to Tap the Market
Ronaldo Foresti
Vice President, Lexmark Asia Pacific and Latin America- Lexmark
Friday, June 1, 2012
Lexmark recently announced its “managed” print services in India as a plan to grow Lexmark India operations. Lexmark’s MPS solutions have enabled global and local enterprises in India to improve productivity and reduce cost across a broad range of industries. There have been quite a lot of changes that have taken place within the company. Lexmark is not just a printer company but also a document managing company. India is of a high priority to Lexmark considering where it wants to expand. India has been the place for Lexmark for all their software developments for commercializing. The market is growing and developing at a fast rate.

Lexmark was founded 20 years ago, headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky. Originally a printing division of IBM Corporation became an individual company. Lexmark continues to be partners with IBM but are not a part of IBM anymore. Lexmark started a life of their own and started to commercialize by making their own devices. Lexmark started as a manufacturer of printing device. It has grown to a company where the printers are almost a computer where they have a variety of functions to perform made of programmable micro codes and also be connected to the internet too for better communication. Lexmark became very involved in looking at customer processes, automating them and making them more efficient.

Ronaldo Foresti, Vice President, Lexmark Asia Pacific and Latin America, Lexmark talks about the company’s vision and strategy for India and how they plan to progress in capturing the developing markets.


Company Portfolio

We have printers from the low end to the mid range to the high end of the work group devices. Our technology has been recognized by organizations and publications from around the world. We have been getting various awards for the software that we have been producing of late. Being a global company, we have a map of configuration of where we are. Our core technology comes from Lexington; however we do have developments in the R&D in Kolkata, India and in Philippines for developments in printers. We also have software development centers in Netherlands. And our technical support centers are located around the world.

Lexmark is today present in over 170 countries directly and through our partners. Total revenue was $4.2 billion until last year out of which U.S. constitutes 43 percent, 36 percent in Europe and 21 percent constitutes rest of the world. We have 13,000 employees of which 29 percent of them are in the U.S. Most of our hardware comes from China, also Philippines for cartridges and Mexico for the toners. We have our worldwide logistics center in China.

Another thing that we are serious about is the environment. Being very environmentally conscious, we incorporate into everything that we do from engineering, shipping, development of products, services that we sell and so on. We are also in all our internal operations. Also, by participating in the community and making sure that we spread the word around us. Our CEO also got an award called "Responsible CEO of the year". There have also been validations that certified our organization to be environmentally friendly. These are awards given only to the top ones and we are proud to have received it.

Plans for India Market

Lately, Lexmark has been incorporating more and more functionality to the solutions that we engineer and develop for our customers. About two years ago, we started to purchase more technology and gain more in the software components, so we could not only scan a file and send it via internet but also look at the content of the document. Hence, we developed the Content Management Software. We also incorporated the business software management systems to our solutions to not only manage our content but also manage the processes for customers. We have now announced three more acquisitions recently which further give us a very powerful interest into the content management system. Today, Lexmark has more than 50 percent of the educational content management software market.

A lot of customer's today prefer a company like Lexmark because it handles every query of a customer. We have the MPS (Managed Printing Service), mobile software that is growing and accounts for almost one third of what Lexmark has as revenue and is growing at 25 percent a year. With these acquisitions, Lexmark has two divisions: the emerging services solutions that have printing devices and all the fleet management software, the other division is the perceptive division which owns DPM, ECM, the search and the Brain ware software. With all these, we offer solutions to a wider area of customers. Today, Lexmark is a 100 percent dedicated to business customers. Our main theme is "print less and save more" which we have been doing for a long time. Though we are in the printing business we would want our customers to print less. When we enter into a business with a new customer, we do an analysis of their environment to consolidate their devices and then add the solutions to it. Through all these combination of processes, we can often cut up to 50 percent of printing costs that a company has. This has proven a success for us to build good relationship with our business partners.

Strengths for Lexmark

We are a complete document management company and this is where we put our attention. This makes Lexmark an easy company to partner with.

We usually certify companies using industry verticals. As we develop solutions, they become important for the financial market, retail market, manufacturing houses and so on. All of our organizations around the world are also specialized according to industries. These help to establish a connect with our customers and speak their language.

The third important thing is the technology ownership. The technology for the laser, inkjet devices and for all our devices is our own. The front office and the back office of the retail companies, almost 90 percent of these global companies are powered by Lexmark in the U.S. 70 percent of the top ten retailers and 80 percent in the U.S. have an MPS agreement with Lexmark to manage their infrastructure. 80 percent of the global banks are Lexmark customers. Also, 30 percent educational operations are carried on by Lexmark.

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