Samsung poised for ‘paradigm shift’ into printing

By Peter Nowak |

Conquering the world of smartphones and televisions would usually be enough for any one company, but Samsung Electronics has grander ambitions. The South Korean giant is readying a new, full-throttle foray into the exciting and sexy world of ... printers?

After announcing record quarterly profit on Friday morning of 9.5 trillion won (US$8.3 billion), a 47-per-cent jump from a year earlier, the move toward printers is unusual, to be sure, given the general sentiment about the business – that it’s dying.

Yet Samsung is aiming for $400 billion in annual revenue by 2020, or more than double its 2012 total of $187 billion. With market observers starting to doubt that the company can continue its momentum in phones, a key part of that projected growth will be expanding into previously untapped markets. That includes printers, or rather, "printing," as executives are keen to point out. There's a big difference.
"We're poised to lead a paradigm shift," says Hyusang Ha, vice-president of product strategy for printing solutions. "We feel the world of printing is changing."

Is printing dead?
Printing is indeed changing. On the consumer side it’s safe to say it’s drying up. Paper consumption has dropped off a cliff everywhere in the world, with the exception of China, since around 2007, which is – not coincidently – when the mobile revolution began in earnest. Since the arrival of the iPhone, consumers have finally been moving to the paperless existence promised by technology for so long. In North America alone, consumption has dropped by about 30 per cent over the past five years.
It’s easy to understand why. With smartphone and tablet apps dominating, people are finding fewer reasons to print out things like travel directions and boarding passes, especially with the exorbitant price of printer ink.

Samsung has fared decently in the consumer segment, claiming up to a quarter of the market, depending on the country. The company has about 5 per cent of the total global market, according to tracking firm IDC, after HP, Canon and Epson – three printing giants.
The problem, Ha says, is that the consumer segment accounts for just over a tenth of the total $200 billion market and, as the paper consumption numbers indicate, it’s flattening out. The enterprise side, on the other hand, is not only a much bigger market, it’s also growing at a healthy 7 per cent per year. That’s where Samsung wants to be.

The enterprise “printing” business is different than the consumer “printer” business because it’s about more than just hardware, Ha says. While consumers simply buy a printer and then refill it with ink every now and then, businesses require ongoing support, cloud hosting, set-up and maintenance, as well as continual supplies, all of which amount to regular revenue for the service provider.

NFC to be key
Pushing into the segment won’t be easy, since it’s currently ruled by established powerhouses such as Xerox and Ricoh. If Samsung has an edge, it may actually be its consumer electronics prowess.
The company is drawing on its mobile expertise by building near-field communications technology into the printers, the first of which will be available in North America in late July. The sensors will allow for a “tap to print” function, where the user will simply touch their phone or tablet to the printer in order to start a job, similar to how Galaxy S devices currently share photos.

Chin Yoon, vice-president of the commercial business group, says NFC is a technology that will soon be everywhere because it allows for quick, efficient and secure transmission of data. Putting it in printers will accelerate its uptake. “We expect that you cannot avoid it," he says.
Samsung also expects NFC will somewhat counter the trend toward paperlessness. Yoon points out that printing isn’t on the decline solely because people don’t want to do it, it’s just that they’re using mobile devices more and, so far, it hasn’t been very easy to print from them.

Ultimately, the company’s move into printing looks like someone driving a car in the wrong direction on a one-way street. While established giants such as HP and Epson are trying to lower their exposure to what conventional wisdom deems is a business in decline, Samsung is convinced there’s still gold in the printed page.

The problem that rivals are having, in Samsung’s view, is that they’re focusing on the wrong markets. Xerox and Ricoh are concentrating almost exclusively on Fortune 1000 companies, where there isn’t much growth, while HP and Canon are too tied to the shrinking consumer market. Small and medium-sized businesses is where Samsung sees the real opportunity. There is perhaps money to be made in those cracks, and as the established players look for opportunities elsewhere.

Staying the course with consumer printers, however, isn’t an option for anyone, Yoon says.
"We can only survive as a division if we're successful in B2B.”

Ten Things I Love About Print

Or Why I'm Re-Launching a Paper Magazine When Everyone's Crying That Print Is Dead
I like the Internet as much as the next blogger. I don't think online media is making us any dumber than we already are. But the Internet will never replace print media for me. I love the look of print. I love the feel of print. I love the smell of print. And I'm irritated by exaggerated reports about the death of print.
Brainless print publications that were only in business to chase advertising dollars might be dying a long-overdue death, but if I have anything to say about it, print itself lives.
I started my first print zine, Hip Mama, when I was in college. I passed it along a few years ago, but when I heard that the new publishers were on the brink of going completely digital, I dropped my other projects and decided to reclaim my magazine.
Because print's not dead to me. None of us needs more screen time. We need tactile, homemade media we can hold in our hands-the kind of media that allows for rumination and slow-sprouting inspiration, not just quick comments and e-fights.

No, print's not dead. To me, print will always mean life. Yep, I love print. Let me count the ways.

1. Print Gets Your Hands Dirty.
I've never had a traditional 9 to 5 job, but I've been working all of my life. I earned my first paychecks by folding and delivering the San Francisco Chronicle in the dark hours of morning. I landed the job when I was eight years old. And for the next six years, my hands were black with the ink of news and self-reliance.

2. Print Lets Me Unplug My Ego.
When I'm reading a great story online, I sometimes "share" it before I've even gotten to the end. My "friends" -- many of whom I've never met -- "like" it while I'm still reading. By the time I get to the last line I've already got a couple of comments complimenting me on my fine taste in stories. This makes me feel important and well-connected. Now, what was that great story about?

3. Print Is Intimate.
All media is communication. But reading black marks on a page is the most intimate form of communication that exists. Social media never really mitigates my existential loneliness. But somehow even alone in a candle-lit cave in Tibet, if I'm reading the words of a dead feminist poet, there can be no isolation.

4. Print Remembers Where It Came From.
I have a lot of my mother's books. I have some of my grandmother's books. I even have a few of my great-grandmother's books. I love it when I stumble on a particular passage that one of them has underlined. Sometime I recognize their shaky handwritten notes in the margins. My mother tended to underline in black. My grandmother preferred red. My great-grandmother used a pencil, but I'll never erase her words.

5. Print Gets Warped and Dog-Eared.
A few years back, I edited and published an anthology called Portland Queer. I had it printed and bound old-school at the local anarchist Eberhardt Press in Portland. It wouldn't have cost me anything more to produce a digital edition, but I didn't bother. The first printing of Portland Queer sold out within a few weeks. The collection won a LAMBDA Literary Award. But nothing filled my heart with quite the same pride as seeing a bathtub-warped and dog-eared copy of the book in someone's bathroom in faraway Santa Fe. Yes, you can read print while you soak in the tub. (Trust me, it's a very poor idea to take your iPhone into the bathtub).

6. Print Is Sexy.
When my girlfriend's in bed with her reading glasses on and a book in her hands -- that's sexy. When she's sitting there squinting at her iPhone, well -- not so much -- then I just think she's having an emotional affair on Facebook.
7. Print Survives the Apocalypse.
I was raised among hippies who perpetually insisted that the shit was about to hit the fan, man, the grid was going down, and civilization would soon collapse into unplugged utopian chaos. My apocalypse survival pack includes a Haruki Murakami book, a copy of the latest Lucky Peach magazine, and a mini letterpress set for emergency zine-making. When the world as we know it ends and we're all refugees trudging toward an unknown future, I won't be carrying my laptop.

8. Print Keeps Our Secrets.
If I read something online, my reading is tracked and tallied by the Big Brother internet brain that targets my tastes and sends ads chasing me from Google to YouTube and back again. But unless I order it from Amazon, hardly anyone can guess what I'm reading in print. And stealthy education, it turns out, is what books were invented for. Up until the third or fourth century A.D., Europeans had to unroll their books to read them. Scrolls evolved into folded pages. Folded pages became gathered pages -- what we now call books. Why books instead of scrolls? Early rebel Christians found they could be made smaller and therefore more convenient when it came to keeping spiritual texts hidden from Roman authorities. Plans for the revolution will not go viral.

9. Print Lives. And Keeps on Living.
This isn't the first time print media has been declared dead. Back in the '60s, people without imagination were sure television spelled the end of print. My old journalism professor, Clay Felker, responded by reinventing the American magazine -- not with short, ultra-visual media that imitated TV, but with long-narrative and novelistic-style writing that added layers of emotional depth to traditional reporting. He had no problem with the Internet. He appreciated online media's ability to focus on psychographic communities over demographic communities. But new media didn't mean the death of the old -- to each its own narrative style.

10. Print Doesn't Get Jealous.
Before anyone accuses me of being a purist or a Luddite, let me say again that I don't hate the internet. Lucky for me, print doesn't care if I watch TV or waste a night reading the BuzzFeed. In fact, I'm relying on new-fangled online crowdfunding at Kickstarter to make sure print lives. Click to it here See? Print didn't mind that at all.

 

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