We know that creating a great wine involves making many carefully considered decisions from the location, soil properties and type of grape to the typical weather patterns, day-to-day nurturing and pruning right up until harvesting.
Mimaki Engineering Co. Ltd, which is publicly listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange, Inc and celebrating its 40th year in 2015, believes that being a successful print systems manufacturer is much like establishing a renowned vineyard. The initial journey may take time but once the highly skilled research and development teams have done their work and their expertise is brought to fruition, the following reputation ensures market recognition, customer satisfaction, and company growth.
Sowing the seeds
And our reputation is growing with turnover increasing by more than 25% in the past five years. Today, 29% of our sales are in Japan while 30% are in Europe. This success story comes from Mimaki Europe B.V., established in Amsterdam, which is this year celebrating a decade in operation. With warehouses in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, it is responsible for the sales, marketing, logistics, administration and technical services through distributors and resellers for all EMEA countries.
In addition to these existing bases, including the US, we have established subsidiaries in fast growing emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. We intend to launch market oriented products tailored to these emerging countries to help extend and diversifying our customer base.
Mimaki Engineering was the first company to introduce piëzo print heads in its UV printers and plotters back in 1997/98 and since then we have developed a wide range of printing equipment, mostly based around on-demand manufacturing. Today, we consist of several businesses addressing customers’ needs in various markets. We aspire to become a development-oriented enterprise and create new business in the market by developing various products which boost our customers’ competitiveness with our original inkjet technology and cutting technology. The company consists of several business units in order to meet customers’ needs in various markets. They regard each unit as a single grape, and aim to shape the entire company like the cluster of grapes.
Cultivating growth
Whereas a vineyard transforms grapes into fine wine we help our customers transform substrates into top quality end products. We have cultivated a burgeoning cellar of both roll-to-roll and flatbed wide-format inkjet printers and cutting machines for the sign/graphics, textile/apparel and industrial markets. They are supported by a complete product range for each group that includes hardware, software and the associated consumable items, such as inks and cutting blades.
We also have a catalogue of innovative, high quality and high reliability products, based on Aqueous dye sublimation, Acid, Reactive Textile, Latex, Eco-solvent, Solvent-UV, Solvent and UV-curable inkjet technology.
Nurturing opportunities
This variety helps us to best service a number of markets with the sign and graphics taking the lion’s share of almost 60%. Industrial products is 23% and textiles and apparel is 8%. All these areas are providing us with exciting opportunities for growth and we are continuously researching additional ways to support opportunities and challenges as they emerge. The creation of high quality, user friendly products requires a high degree of Emotional Intelligence, so we make sure to keep the finger on the pulse of our customers.
Among our latest launches we have therefore focused on environmentally friendly and energy efficient products including groundbreaking latex and solvent UV inks as well as ecologically friendly UV LED technology, precise array of staggered heads and automatic change of double ink cartridges. We are also seeking to expand our global market share of digital on demand printing systems with inkjet printers that can reduce power consumption and ink waste. Our new Inkjet Laboratory supports inkjet technology application developments in collaboration with different industries, based on pattern formation or coating of liquid.
Extending market reach
We are establishing a ‘One Week Production and Inventory Cycle' (OWPIC) – a production system that can respond immediately to fluctuations in global demand by executing the assembly and inventory planning on a weekly basis. Each production stage in the manufacturing department – management, purchasing, manufacturing, production engineering and quality assurance – is coordinated to perfection in order to produce high quality products. To improve total cost competitiveness we identify four criteria, i.e. ‘Q(quality), C(cost), D(delivery) and S(speed)’. In the day to day production environment employees focus on ‘Visual Production Management', in which a problem is promptly discussed in dedicated work section teams. We believe it instills confidence as far as customers are concerned.
Key ingredients
As one of the industry’s most creative sommeliers we would like to give you our take on how the five basic wine characteristics can be translated into a business-winning formula:
1. Body – The infrastructure of Mimaki has been built up over the past 40 years to create a solid foundation that supports an 8% reinvestment of our annual turnover into research and development. This ensures all potential opportunities for product growth are explored.
2. Sweetness – Helping our customers hit the sweetspot of production is what drives our continued product development programme. We create solutions that deliver maximum productivity to support customer profitability and open up new markets and revenue streams.
3. Acidity – Everyone wants to be the business that packs such an energetic punch that customers and end users keep coming back. Aside from the reliability, robust build and quality output Mimaki solutions deliver flexibility to broaden service reach.
4. Tannin – like tannin, ink is an essential compound in the creation of the final print. Getting the recipe and mix right is critical and that is why our latest developments have focused on high-performing eco-friendly latex inks.
5. Fruit – The fast-growing portfolio of solutions that reflects the varied demands of today’s production environment from entry level to superfast super wide solutions. Mimaki listens to what customers require to allow them to deliver on end-user expectations.
Or as the Italian proverb goes: ‘A buon intenditor poche parole’ – ‘To the connoisseur merely a few words suffice’.
