In the last few years, he has fallen in love with colourful Indian weddings and the many vintage car events that take place across the country. For Manabu Yamazaki, president and CEO of Canon India, it’s been a life dedicated to pictures. He loves his Canon PowerShot SX60 HS and Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III, keeping them close to him during trips. During his recent trip to Calcutta to unveil something called ‘live office infrastructure’, he sat down with us to talk about different categories of equipment his company is focusing on and camera trends.
Manabu Yamazaki, president and CEO, Canon India
What is the new ‘live office infrastructure’ concept you have for Canon India?
Live office is — to put it simply — a showroom where people work. If you say showroom, then it’s a place where all products are showcased for people to touch and try. This is actually a lot more than that. The live office concept itself was born during my previous tenure in China. I was in Shanghai about three years ago. We started taking this approach of converting office into live (space) on a smaller scale because in some of those branch offices we have little space with about 30 to 40 people. Most of the time, you have to go outside to entertain customers. But the products were mostly sitting in the warehouse, not outside. So they decided to convert the office… to make it more live, meaning a place where products are being demonstrated or just being used. I thought, when I landed here, it was a great opportunity. We were about to renew the office contract. So why not change this over to make it work. After Covid, we decided to shift into hybrid working style, which means most of the office space is vacant. So there are a lot of dead spaces. So I decided to rationalise it.
This will help partners of Canon….
Absolutely. That’s one of the purposes behind having this. Most partners have had a hard time running their own showroom, because rents are high, and you have to make money out of it. But those display units take up so much space. If we convert our own office into this display showcase where partners can come in and introduce (products) to their own clients… there are a lot of underexposed products that we sell. So there’s an opportunity for us to make that exposure available.
Canon has a wide range of printers on offer — for home to office to those for special projects
A Canon office printer in action
Hobbyist and specialists are interested in Canon cameras
Talking about products, any new trends you have been noticing?
In terms of what we are doing recently, there is something around surveillance systems, which has grown into such a large chunk of the market as everyone’s looking for a new style of doing things in terms of security, in terms of remote management, in terms of observation/assessment of the quality of the job being delivered. All of that requires online digital transformation; the surveillance systems, or maybe video analytics, not so much about inspection, but more about statistics and doing analysis… is commonly used for many verticals today. So video server, the surveillance analytics system with AI integrated and then the camera systems… that’s all wired together. We have structured our organisation into different units. So the surveillance team is one independent team within the organisation, which makes it easier for them to focus and concentrate on that.
Any new trends as far as cameras go? More and more content creators are using Canon.
Overall, we are still selling lots of digital SLR cameras and entry-level and that’s still widely available. What’s picking up is higher value-added products, like mirrorless cameras. And we have a full lineup on offer, right up to high-end. There are so many different users asking for them. The market is growing fast. We’re trying to offer the right product mix to make sure that we’re able to supply on time. India has a strong wedding industry, which has a seasonality factor. And we have to ensure orders are met on time. So managing timing in supply and demand is important.
What about mirrorless cameras?
Great! We are receiving huge orders. There are lots of queries coming in. The overall demand pool is very solid. We’re trying to top up the quantity that we’re able to supply by negotiating with the factory side.
Many are starting with their phone cameras and then going on to something dedicated, like Canon cameras.
Obviously, vloggers are started out with their phones, and they’re upgrading their system into something else; maybe upgrading to digital SLR or upgrading to something more unique. The angle we have involves highlighting specific areas of vlogging and not just regular vlogging in which you just talk to the camera. There are lots of hobbyist and specialists who focus on specific areas of interest, and go deep into those topics. They are actually using some of the important features on our cameras. As income levels increase, the number of hobbyists will continue to multiply.