MANAGED SERVICES
From copier company to technology partner
James Goulding talks to Sharp UK CEO Stuart Sykes about how the company has grown and diversified over the last 10 years and its plans for the next five
Corporation for a number of years, and which underpins everything Sharp has achieved in the last decade, including its acquisition of NEC’s display business. Over and above that, he suggests that being part of Foxconn has allowed Sharp to focus on what it does best. “Foxconn is one of the biggest and most renowned EMS (electronic manufacturing service) businesses in the world. Making things for other people is where its real skill set lies and that’s what it continues to do. Sharp’s real skill set has been around the brand and using that brand to sell and look after clients, rather than in manufacturing things for other people. Ten years ago, Sharp did a bit of that, making devices to go into BMW cars for example, but, speaking kindly, it wasn’t the most profitable part of the business. “Now, both companies are playing to their strengths. Foxconn is doing that type of manufacturing for the portfolio, and Sharp is doing less of it and really focusing on the brand business. They call it an asset-light transformation, losing some of the manufacturing plants for those other devices, which have gone to Foxconn, and concentrating on the brand side and becoming more of a B2C and B2B business. Today, B2B is around 60% of what Sharp does, which is a completely different position to when I joined back in 2011.”
As an example of how Foxconn’s manufacturing capability and Sharp’s brand capability dovetail, Stuart cites their recently announced collaboration on AI that will see the latter buy Sharp-branded AI servers from Foxconn and use the Sharp brand and infrastructure to sell and support those AI servers, initially in the Japanese market “That’s a prime example of where things have been going and will continue to go in the future. Foxconn will do more manufacturing and we will do more selling and supporting,” he says. A balanced business In the UK, the financial muscle and stability provided by Foxconn has enabled Sharp UK to make two acquisitions, managed print services provider Midshire in 2017 and IT services provider Complete I.T. in 2019. These would not have happened otherwise and are fundamental to the company’s growth and diversification strategy. Today, Sharp UK has four distinct product and service offerings – managed print, managed IT services, AV and workplace design – and is a much more balanced business than it was when Stuart became CEO. “Compared to 10 years ago, when it would have been 90% print at least, we are now in a position where it’s 55% print.
Stuart Sykes
The opening of Sharp UK’s new headquarters in Leeds seemed like a good opportunity to take another look at the company, not least because it is 10 years since Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn acquired a struggling Sharp Corporation. What impact has that had on the Sharp brand and its diversification agenda? As well as being a leading vendor of multifunction printers (MFPs) and displays, with an extensive reseller network, Sharp UK is an IT managed service provider through its acquisition of Complete I.T. in 2019. How has that side of its business grown in the last seven years and how successful has Sharp been in packaging its services for resale through the channel? To discuss these and other questions, who better than Stuart Sykes who joined Sharp UK in 2011 when Sharp acquired copier company IOT and has been CEO since 2016. We started by asking him about the benefits of being under the ownership of Foxconn and the word he immediately comes up with is ‘stability’, specifically financial stability, which had eluded Sharp
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