Epson SA yesterday announced the termination of its distribution agreements with Tarsus Technologies. This follows the decision by Epson SA to rationalise and restructure its local distribution channel.
Commenting on the termination, Epson SA`s GM, Hans Dummer says: "Tarsus has not met expectations with regard to meeting sales forecasts over the last few months."
In response, Tarsus today issued a statement "Some months ago it became apparent that Epson`s market share was not growing as it had anticipated after the appointment of a third distributor," says Guy Whitcroft, MD of Tarsus Technologies, in a statement issued today. "The demand previously experienced for the products was being supplanted by other brands - namely OKI in the dot matrix market, and HP in the non-impact market."
He quotes data from BMI-TechKnowledge reports which shows that Epson`s share of South African dot matrix printer revenue declined from 46.3% in 1997 to 23.1% in the first half of this year (being overtaken by OKI, another member of the MB Technologies group).
"Tarsus has been distributing Epson products for the last two-and-a-half years," Dummer says. Epson has made the decision not to replace Tarsus Technologies with another distributor at this time. "This is largely due to the fact that our volume expectations are being adequately met by our other two distributors, namely Mustek and SDD, which have been contributing over 90% of our overall monthly sales figures."
Dummer says that although these statistics might appear to be negative "we grew substantially in the dot matrix market, and increased dramatically in turnover in the non-impact market (due to the fact that we don`t have a sub-R1 000 model). We made a decision about Tarsus based solely on the fact that it did not make its targets."Dummer says Mustek had achieved better results with Epson because its structure was better suited to selling the product, as it doesn`t deal with HP print
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