Canon Middle East announces exceptional performance

With an increase in turnover of 41% over the same period last year, these results mark the tenth straight quarter of 35%+ growth, unbroken since Canon Middle East became a full subsidiary in 2001. Canon's success in the Middle East reflects the leading position it has taken internationally, where the company has bucked a sluggish global economy to notch up 10% worldwide growth in net sales, and becoming the "bluest of the blue-chips" among Japanese corporations.

Particularly strong results come as Canon takes the lead in this region's burgeoning market for advanced digital technologies. In enterprise office equipment, Canon has more than doubled its sales in advanced digital Colour Laser Copiers (122% growth), and shown similar success in digital multifunctionals (68% growth). The same success can be found in the consumer space, with a 93% increase in digital camera sales. Other high points include a 56% growth in the hotly contested and highly competitive bubble jet printers arena.

Notable successes geographically include Saudi Arabia (48% growth), UAE (49% growth), and a huge 97% growth in Iran.

"This year has started extraordinarily well for Canon in the Middle East, with record results in many sectors. Despite the intense political turmoil which led many analysts to predict a huge market slowdown, our business did not miss a beat," said Gordon Jones, President of Canon Middle East. Previous years have shown similar excellent double digit growth.

"We have invested heavily in our channel in this region," added Jones. "We've been conducting extensive training programmes for our regional reseller network, and extended our back-end information systems to improve distributor and dealer support, allowing Web-based management of warranties for our Middle East customers. This has brought us closer to our customers, allowing us to provide service more efficiently."

The highly competitive consumer sector (photo-video, bubble jet printers, scanners, etc) achieved 35% growth. This reflects consumers' increasing awareness that quality and reliability are crucial for the long-term enjoyment of their purchases, along with no-compromise focus on ever more advanced features.

Growth in business solutions (copiers, document management, plotters, projectors) has been a phenomenal 56%, substantially due to corporate customers' move to digital technologies. Digital allows business to take advantage of some enormously powerful features, such as Canon's Universal Send (email, remote copy, push scan, fax forwarding or store to database from an imageRUNNER digital copier).

Looking forward, the first two months of this quarter have been equally strong with double-digit growth continuing the momentum. Canon Middle East is confident of the immense market opportunity still waiting to be tapped, and will be having its largest and most impressive stand ever at GITEX 2003 (in Hall 2), where both consumers and businesses to find fantastic new technologies, and integrated solutions that make them more efficient.

Globally, despite a slow first half of 2003 in the US, Japan and Europe, Canon's consolidated net sales for the first half increased by 10.9% from this period last year to ¥1,535.6 billion (US$12,797 million). On a half-year basis, net income recorded an all-time high of ¥127.8 billion (US$1,065 million), a year-on-year increase of a record 74.5%.

"Our success globally can be traced directly back to our corporate strategy of investing heavily in Research and Development, and invest even more in production efficiencies. This has allowed us to bring better quality, more innovative and more feature rich products to market than other manufacturers, at very competitive prices," explained Jones. "In enterprise systems, we're unique in the breadth of solutions we can offer for information and document management: from the input and output hardware to the software that processes, stores and manages it."

Canon is No. 1 worldwide in copying machines and laser beam printers, and is poised to become No.1 in the home photo-printing market. The company is uniquely positioned to achieve this, as it is one of the only companies to possess world-leading technology for both cameras and photo-quality colour printers.

Canon's strategy with digital technologies is to give customers more choice, and the ability to customize their systems to their needs. Canon was the first manufacturer in the Middle East to introduce the new PictBridge industry standard into its products (any compliant camera can be connected directly to any brand PictBridge printer). This strategy of embracing open standards also applies to its enterprise solutions, where IT departments can create powerful solutions using their existing Java technology skills on intelligent office products.