Toshiba Europe GmbH today announces its ambitions and strategy for the financial year ahead, with aims to cement and grow the company’s position in the business computing market.

“With over 30 years heritage in the business device market, solving business challenges and driving efficiencies is in our DNA,” reflects Maki Yamashita, Vice President, B2B PC, Toshiba Europe GmbH. “For us, last year was about refocusing and ensuring we put ourselves in the best possible position to thrive in a competitive sector. We focused on laying the foundations for a structure that gives us the freedom to forge deeper and even more effective relationships with our partners and end-users. This was crucial in informing the direction we take our range of dedicated business devices and future solutions, as we take the unique step of assuming complete control of the design and manufacturing process.”

Presence and partnerships The past year saw Toshiba renew its focus on the mid-market and corporate space while driving closer relationships with its partners and end-users through a range of new sales and marketing initiatives – the most recent being the company’s pan-European ‘Make IT work’ campaign. This was designed to highlight the company’s strong position for supporting the evolving demands of today’s business environments, while also showcasing its broadest and most diverse range of business solutions to date.

Toshiba will build and further commit to the mid-market and corporate space in the year ahead by extending the strategic support and contact it has with partners, but also current and prospective customers. To drive awareness, preference and support across these bases, the company has altered how resource is weighed within its sales teams between partners and end-users. Three quarters of the European sales teams are now dedicated to liaising directly to end-users in order to foster closer relationships and gain a more immediate, direct understanding of emerging challenges businesses are facing. In addition, Toshiba’s pan-European call centre, launched in 2015, will dedicate greater resource to communicating with prospective clients in the corporate and mid-market areas directly. It is intended that these conversations will both help to drive new business, and pave the way to new opportunities for Toshiba’s channel partners. Toshiba’s unwavering commitment to the channel will remain crucial to the company in which it has decided to be more focused with its distribution strategy by forging select, strategic partner relationships in Europe.

In tandem to mid-market and corporate customer retention and acquisition, Toshiba will continue to focus its efforts on the government, higher education and wider public sector in countries such as the UK, Spain and Netherlands, where Toshiba already has a strong, established presence in these markets.

“We believe the investments we are making across EMEA are creating strong conditions for growing our PC business in our core regions and sectors” adds Maki Yamashita. “We’re confident in the strength of our renewed strategy and are aiming for double digit growth across these verticals.”

Agility from structure, to production Further changes will see Toshiba Europe expand its remit to encompass the Middle East and Africa, and thereby acting as one of four strategic bases for the company’s global business computing and solutions organisation.

The company will also embrace a more nimble approach to its product development and production with all design and manufacturing being entirely in-house. Its latest laptops are now all manufactured by Toshiba’s owned and managed factory in Hangzhou, China, enabling the company to ensure design and quality at every stage of the production process.

“Hangzhou allows us to assume complete control of the quality, design, functionality, and security of our products, which hugely benefits our partners and customers – both in terms of the accelerated timescales to market and seamless manufacturing process, but also the unparalleled peace of mind we can offer when it comes to security,” comments Maki Yamashita. “For example, we already produce our own BIOS to remove the risk of third party interference, which could leave a device more vulnerable to attack.”

In addition to its traditional business computing heritage, Toshiba has also created a dedicated European team to bring new solutions to market for businesses based on the extensive research and development taking place within the wider Toshiba Corporation. With further announcements planned, this will create opportunities to support both customers and partners with new technologies and solutions.