PROPRINT: What’s the purpose of your latest visit to Australia?
HAYZLETT: As one of the executive officers of the company, I like to get out and see customers as much as possible. I was in this part of the world and I wanted to come down. I’ve already scheduled three meetings in Australia over the next 12 months, as it’s a very important market for us. I’m meeting a lot of customers on the consumer and the B2B sides. I’m meeting with the Kodak team here to talk about upcoming plans and the changes inside the company. We’ve had a massive transformation as a company, probably one of the biggest turnarounds in America’s corporate history.
Going sector by sector, how is Kodak’s Print On Demand Solutions (PODS) business going?
Remarkably well. It’s a strong piece for us inside of our workflow business. We not only provide the front ends and the systems for our own machines but we’re building them for a number of others. Xerox is one of our larger customers.
Are there issues with providing R&D for OEM partners, who are, after all, rival vendors?
When you’re a proprietor and you’re selling intellectual property on the B2B and consumer side, which we do a lot of, we keep it very strict. We have “walls” and only a few of the executives go on either side of these walls. The business units are kept separate and it creates some good tension in terms of running the business.
For example, I was in Japan recently and was meeting with a major competitor and customer of ours. Throughout the meeting, they asked certain questions, basically trying to find out if other people inside Kodak knew if we were about to partner with them, and our people did not. I was the only one in the room who happened to know.
Is it a unique model for this industry?
I don’t think it is. I think a lot of people are used to dealing with one of our competitors but now that Kodak is in this business, we intend to do it in a much bigger way. Combining with what we do on Unified Workflow [which includes Prinergy and Insite], I think people just take it for granted.
On the subject of Unified Workflow, how is that product being accepted in the market?
It’s become the de facto standard. If you look at products like Prinergy or Insite StoreFront, our market share is typically in double digits, and our closest competitors are in low single digits. And we’re the only company that has a foot in traditional offset and the digital side. It’s one of our fastest growing areas in the business, especially in Asia-Pacific.
How does Kodak see itself in the “transpromo” market?
We invented it. Transpromo was actually a term that I started when I was working with Scitex Digital Printing, and it’s carried over since we bought the company. We’re clearly the leader. In the USA, our Versamark machines drive five per cent of the entire mail stream, and most of that is transpromo.
Are you concerned by the Xerox challenge in transpromo, through its “Sugi” toner press?
The only comment I have about our competitors in transpromo is that they’re making nice baby steps. We welcome good competition, but you can stack up our competitors’ machines and they won’t equal what one of ours will do in output.
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