Kodak graphic communications group

Video Transcript: [ Music ] >>Mark Weber: Okay. The graphic communications group is one of Kodak's largest growing businesses. It's comprised of many former companies merged into one to drive printing within both the commercial printing industry as well as corporate and government areas. And then our main segments and products are digital printing or consumables or workflow or services are the four main types of products we sell. My name is Mark Weber. I'm the vice president of Worldwide Sales Partnerships for Kodak's digital printing solutions group. Most of our customers are printing to make money. I mean, that is their business. That's what they bring home checks to their families for. So it's very important that we help them grow their businesses from a full plate of solutions rather than just single boxes. [ Music ] Our product strategy is we have two portions of our business. We have customers who are still using offset or analogue equipment. It's a multibillion dollars industry. And we have a portion of our business that is already into digital printing. The offset printing process is using traditional presses that go all the way back to Gutenberg. And what you're doing is you're putting on the press, setting up the equipment, and generally needing to run tens of thousands of images to be cost effective. But customers are coming back and saying, Now I need shorter run lengths and I need it today or yesterday not three days from now. Digital printing, it enables you to more quickly print on demand. Our competition tends to be very specialized. So we compete against Xerox who's specialized in digital printing. We compete against -Agfa's specialized in components for offset printing. Compete against Heidelberg that makes printing presses. We have a workflow now that ties all these capabilities together. [ Music ] Kodak has traditionally been a B2C type company dealing directly with the consumers. B2B is one step different and a different type of customer. We focus on several segments of the industry. Biggest is the commercial segment, and that is commercial printers. Then we have the packaging industry. The packaging industry is about the same size of the overall industry, and that's people producing your Kellogg's corn flakes box. They're also in the publishing industry. That's our third of four segments. And last but not least, we're in the transactional printing part of the world; and that's printing checks, printing documents. So those are the four primary segments. All of them are doing business with very large investments. So if we're selling a camera on the Kodak.com system, I'm having to [inaudible] customer's time trying to sell them a $350 camera. On the other hand, I might be trying to sell them a $350,000 press or a $3.5 million solution. It's a different way of approaching that type of customer that's different from B2B than it is from a B2C. [ Music ] We depend on a direct sales force, both direct and indirect sales force, people calling on those customers. Generally people don't put their credit card down for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. So because we have to touch those customers differently or multiple times before they're really interested, we use a lot of tools available to the B2C. We just use them differently. We also have hundreds of distributors, dealers, and resellers. Sometimes they are in a geography where it's not cost effective [inaudible]. Sometimes they are focused on better professionals on a particular area where we are to get into, but it would be difficult to train our people to do the same thing. So we don't try with Kodak to do things that are outside our normal experiences. [ Music ] There's many different ways we promote graphic communications group products.