Sharp Middle East Celebrates 40 Years of Leadership in Document Solutions
- Total 16 million document units produced worldwide by December 2011
- First of two milestones celebrated this year
Sharp Middle East is this month celebrating 40 years of bringing quality document solutions to customers and has pledged to maintain its commitment to delivering world-class, reliable, innovative and environmentally-friendly printing solutions across the region.
The anniversary comes in Sharp’s centennial year, and further celebrations are planned in the Middle East in September when Sharp officially marks its 100th birthday.
“Sharp is at the forefront of end-to-end business solutions in the region, and celebrating 40 years of our document solutions is testament to this,” said Tomoo Shimizu, Director – Business Solutions Division, Sharp Middle East. “It’s fantastic to recognise 40 years of document products in the same year as our 100th anniversary.”
Shimizu added: “With a Market Share of 20% for our document solutions in the region to date, we see exceptional growth potential as we introduce more end-to-end solutions which build on our 40 year knowledge base to offer cutting-edge value adding systems.”
Last year Sharp established a representative office in South Africa in order to have direct contact with its partners and customers in country. Shimizu says that South Africa is the prime focus territory for Sharp in the Middle East and Africa region in 2012.
“South Africa is a mature market and the potential opportunity of solution based sales is extremely exiting. We believe that our success in South Africa can be replicated in other parts of Africa, therefore, we will continue to invest in developing our local presence while building and nurturing the channel to expand our reach,” he adds.
Sharp’s current extensive line-up of colour and black and white multi-function printers (MFPs) builds upon its rich heritage in document solutions, which began in 1972 with the SF-201, Sharp’s first copier.
Since then, Sharp has continually expanded worldwide production of its document systems, which include copiers, printers and MFPs. At the end of 2011, total production worldwide had surpassed 16 million units.
Key to sales growth has been Sharp’s reputation for superb image quality, reliability and user-friendliness, in addition to excellent environmental performance. Sharp’s has consistently designed and built on its heritage of innovations and all of its products are packed with proprietary know-how, such as the MX-2310U colour network-enabled MFP, which includes Sharp’s Open System Architecture (OSA) Network Scanner Tool providing seamless integration with network applications; Document Filing, for reusing job data stored on a system’s hard disk; and large next-generation LCD touchscreen displays.
Such a long history of producing document solutions and the inclusion of these class-leading features, mean they continue year after year to receive accolades and numerous awards from the industry’s leading analysts, including Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), BERTL, and Better Buys for Business.
