Samsung doubles print team in renewed channel push

Samsung Electronics has doubled its UK based print division by headcount, adding staff with more than 67 years of cumulative experience at other major vendors to revamp its attack on the market.

Anthony Penton, new head of marketing for the print division, said the high-powered team would be headed by print division director Geoff Slaughter.

Slaughter was hired in February and has totted up some 15 years of experience at Canon, mainly serving the B2B channel. His last four years at Canon were as reseller channel director where he grew Canon’s reseller business by 25 per cent, Penton said.

“Right from the top, we’ve brought a number of different people from a number of different vendors, really for the common good of Samsung,” Penton said.

Some “might have been” headhunted but, equally, some had approached Samsung, presumably for the opportunities they could see within the Korean vendor, he said.

Slaughter would work to strengthen the back office support and operational aspects of the print offering while maintaining quality of service and customer satisfaction, according to a statement released by Samsung.

Joining Slaughter and Penton are new head of B2B – print Keith Monte-D’Cruz, head of B2C – print Jeff Hart, head of vertical markets Glen Mason, product marketing manager John Gowland and channel marketing manager Abby Denton.

Monte-D’Cruz had also been at Canon for 12 years and Mason comes off a decade of corporate sales and marketing at Canon to work at integrating the development of public and commercial verticals. Denton also has 15 years at Canon under her belt.

“From a channel perspective, obviously profitability is important. We want to make sure the model is profitable. We also want to support business in a number of areas, such as demand generation,” Penton said.

Hart joined from Epson and will be overseeing retail market activity, which Penton said was booming but not at the expense of B2B.

“We are in discussions with a number of big retailers in the UK that want to take a number of our products in store and also online,” he said. “But, at the same time, the B2B part of our business is scaling up.”

Gowland is from Lexmark.

Penton himself comes from 15 years of senior sales and marketing UK and Europe experience at Xerox and will be focusing on aligning different product with the right channels.

He said that this phase of the division’s growth started in early 2008 and further additions are expected in coming months.

Samsung during the year had become the fastest-growing printer supplier in Europe and was the number two print vendor, he claimed.