Exhibits 2.20-2.25
Dealer meetings are an excellent forum for OEMs to update, educate, and create goodwill among their dealer partners. Some meetings occur yearly, but most are scheduled on an 18-month cycle. The only two Big Six OEM dealer meetings scheduled for 2020—for Kyocera and Toshiba—fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains to be seen if the OEMs will have better luck scheduling meetings in 2021. This portion of the Survey focuses on dealer meetings that took place prior to 2020.
We ask dealers to rate their primary A3 MFP suppliers’ meetings as “Excellent,” “Very Good,” “Good,” “Fair,” or “Poor.” If a dealer did not respond, we did not factor that response into our ratings because either they didn’t attend the meeting, or they declined to offer a valid opinion of that event. We then awarded five points for “Excellent,” four points for “Very Good,” three points for “Good,” two points for “Fair,” and one point for “Poor.” We then divided the total by the number of dealers participating from that manufacturer.
Dealers have strong opinions about these meetings, particularly when they do not live up to expectations. We hear these opinions while we are at the meeting, we hear them afterwards, and we see them in the results in our Survey. These opinions tend to reflect the time commitment dealers must make to attend these events. Depending on the location and the schedule, these meetings can run anywhere from two to four days. Those who attend don’t want to feel as if they’ve wasted their time when they could be back at the office running their businesses. The OEMs seem to understand this and are tweaking their meetings and agendas to make them more compact, eliminating many of the extracurricular activities that took place in the afternoons during the final day of the meeting such as horseback rides, rafting tours, and jeep tours in the desert. We remember those activities fondly. Those activities were great bonding experiences but had to cost a fortune. A meeting that focuses primarily on business during the day with evening entertainment has become the norm.
Exhibits 2.20 to 2.25 illustrate the ratings for each of the Big Six OEMs. The average rating for the Big Six OEM dealer meetings was 4.1. That score was driven down by Kyocera and Canon, the only two OEMs receiving ratings below 4.0 for the second consecutive year. In fairness to Canon, its rating of 3.8 was identical to last year’s, still a significant improvement over the 3.0 it received in our 2018 Survey. Apparently, Kyocera dealers are not happy with the direction of the company’s dealer meetings as its rating declined from 3.7 in 2019 to 3.3 this year. There have been numerous personnel changes from the top to the bottom at Kyocera over the past two years and that could be a factor here.
The ratings for Konica Minolta (4.2), Ricoh (4.6), and Sharp (4.6) were slightly higher than in our previous Survey. Ricoh was the last of the Big Six OEMs to hold a dealer meeting—in November of 2019—so that meeting was still fresh in respondents’ minds when filling out the Survey. We were there, and it was a tremendous meeting. Ricoh and Sharp also had the highest percentage of dealers who rated their meetings excellent, 69% for Ricoh and 65% for Sharp. No other OEM exceeded 50%, again a reflection of how difficult dealers are to please. Some of the criteria that go into determining their ratings is content, quality of the speakers, breakout sessions, new product introductions, and location. Anecdotally, we know that when an OEM does not have new products to show or discuss, dealers tend to be harsher in their criticism and often feel they wasted valuable time traveling to these events.
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