Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia marked its first day of operation after ending its long-running partnership with Xerox Corporation with a traditional smoking ceremony performed by local Indigenous people.

The new beginning includes a new name with Fuji Xerox Australia now a thing of the past, with Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia taking its place.

Uncle David Barnett led the local Indigenous dancers in a moving smoking ceremony in front of all staff at the company’s offices in Macquarie Park in Sydney last Thursday, the first day of official business in the new entity.

All of Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia’s staff also joined outside to watch the ceremony.

Exciting change marked

Ken Sugiyama, Corporate Vice President of Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia, said the day marked an exciting change in the company’s 85 year history.

“Until yesterday we were a Fuji Xerox company and now we are a Fujifilm company and this is a great opportunity for all of us because we can collaborate with all of the Fujifilm entities,” Sugiyama said after the smoking ceremony on Thursday.

“We are a 100 per cent subsidiary of Fujifilm and that means we can utilise all of the resources, not only human resources, but also massive technology platforms from a wide range of business fields including photo imaging, bio-imaging, medical systems, graphic arts systems with wide format, regenerative medicine, we even have stem cell technology.

A lot of this technology is connected to film manufacturing technology which is very complicated and in the future, we will utilise these technologies to develop new areas such as Artificial Intelligence, such as in Japan where we have detected lung cancer in patients that cannot be detected with human eyes.”

Takayuki Togo, Managing Director Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia, reflected that after 34 years with Fuji Xerox, last Thursday marked his first day with the new company.

“We love the Xerox brand but now I am so excited, even the Japanese employees are so excited, to enter into the new era for our company because there are a lot of benefits,” Takayuki said.

He added the change in the business marks a win for customers.

“Our first priority is always customers. There is a lot of benefit from changing the company’s name – however the most important benefit is to add additional value to our customers – this is most important by combining Fujifilm manufacturing capability and our technology – we can provide much more valuable solutions and hardware to our customers,” he said.

“This is most important, and that is why I am so excited to not only change the company’s name, we are refreshing ourselves and our company. Fuji Xerox has been leading the copier and MFD company in Australia.

“Many people saying that printing volumes are slightly declining, and most of this information is gradually shifting to digital. We are now shifting our strategy from the box to solution services to meet the changing customer.”

From a practical perspective, Takayuki said Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia will handle the the Xerox brand for a certain period of time until new Fujifilm branded products are available.

“We have already started collaborating with Fujifilm Australia and they have good wide format products,” he said.

“So now we have full scale collaboration and we can introduce very competitive products to our existing customers or new customers and I believe this will make us more competitive.”

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