Eizo means business in reseller recruitment drive

New year will mark start of new enterprise expansion

Monitor specialist Eizo has tripled its sales to commercial enterprises and is building up its reseller channel even further, with a new channel manager who will start in January.

Rob Smyth, UK head of channel at Eizo (pictured), said the newly independent firm's refocus on the channel was already paying off, and more is yet to come.

"Over the past 12 months, we have started to get more of a share of the market again, going from less than a per cent to one, two, three or more on upwards," he said.

"We have three offices in the UK, and everybody works for Eizo; we don't subcontract anything out, we do our own repairs."

Eizo's big focus is top-quality product supported by "getting the details right" when it comes to the channel and customer service, Smyth said.

In the past, Eizo displays have been concentrated in high-end applications such as gaming, financial services, and the professional photography industry. However, it wants to sell more to businesses too.

"What we really want is to get the resellers selling for us again," he said. "We've done it this year, and we've put in an incentive with a cash reward for that, and that seems to be working well."

Japan-headquartered Eizo was founded in 1968 with UK distribution going to Avnet in the late 1990s - where it saw a sales decline from its displays' peak popularity in the 1980s and 1990s in cutting-edge financial services implementations.

Management decided the distribution operation would do better flying on its own again and brought it back from Avnet in November 2011, setting up new local subsidiaries in the UK and Europe in early 2012 to cover 14 countries.

Now it is a matter of rebuilding the brand and its visibility to cement and build up the sales growth it is already seeing, Smyth confirmed.

It has also set up a UK logistics operation to provide next-day delivery on stock items, and continues to offer five-year warranties on most displays.

According to a statement, Eizo only sells through the channel.