There are some obstacles in the global printing market that Samsung Electronics should cope with. Though ‘Digital Printing’, selected as one of the main business in 2005 by Samsung, has gradually grown, its market share is only at the ABC in comparison with HP and Xerox.

Samsung designated ‘Digital Printing’ as one of its eight main business sectors in November 2005 and has actively supported it by increasing its agents by twice. As a result, its market share in the filed of razor multifunction took the second place by 14.6%.

However, its market share in the US and Europe, which are two big markets in the world, is not satisfactory. The most important task is to obtain satisfactory result from these two markets that form over 90% of Samsung printing sales.

What Samsung chose was to actively participate in the trend of document management in business market. This implies the close connection with ECM (Enterprise Document Management). As the most suitable partner, it chose Microsoft (MS).

Samsung SamrThru, its flexibility and compatibility
Samsung has challenged B2B Digital Multifunction market. Its ‘SamrThru Workflow’ solution solves the problem of ECM by effectively saving paper documents that are major parts of enterprises’ internal documents.

This solution manages multifunctional works: ‘SamrThru office’ manages document inputing, processing and facsimiling. In addition, it has various functions such as letter recognition scan, PC save, e-mailing, and facsimile.

There are some competitive solutions in the market, such as HP’s ‘DSS’, Xerox’s ‘Smartsend’, and EMC’s ‘Captiva’ on the side of ECM. Samsung’s ‘SamrThru’ is a late comer in the solution market and is behind EMC in the aspect of ECM.

Nevertheless, Samsung has argued that its competitiveness and potentiality are not low. According to Sung-Man Cha, a section chief of Samsung Digital Printing Department, “while other solutions are compatible with their own products, our solution can be used in the connection with various ECM vendors. While other solutions provide little support for version up or customization, these are flexible in our solution. The 2.0 version of SmarThru will appear in the market by the end of this year. This version will minimize the cost burden associated with SMB market by operating together with MS ECM.”

Samsung chooses MS as ECM partner to challenge multifunction printer market
Samsung expects that the multifunction printer market will be grown together with company’s workflow. This is why Samsung concentrates on ECM. The combination of multifunction and ECM is expected to maximize company’s efficiency that will be the primary concern of companies. ‘Speed’ and ‘cost reduction’ will be secondary issues.

Samsung selected MS sharepoint server, which is office-based ECM, as its official partner in the reasons of ‘easy applicability’ and ‘inexpensive price’. According to Kuk-Hee Lee, a vice-chief of Korea MS, “ECM is not applied only to large corporations whose IT budget is over hundred billion Won. In the case of Sharepoint, existing customers can easily use Samsung’s multifunction printer because the price of server license is just five million Won.”

Samsung is now suggesting multifunction printers with SmarThou Workflow solution to financial agencies in Europe. The 1.0 version of SmarThru, which will appear in October, supports six foreign languages and Chinese version will be added in the near future.

Until now, however, rather than having promoted its own business, Samsung has been establishing a business model with MS. Mr. Cha said, “we plan to increase Samsung multifunction printer’s market share by acquiring existing customers who have already used Documentum and Filenet’s ECM and promoting new customers in the cooperation with MS.”

And he added, “Samsung expects the expansion of the market. We plan to lead the market not for existing printer customers but for enterprises that need ECM. We also have a focused strategy on the process of ‘document generation,’ not on the whole process of ECM.”