PRINTITRESELLER.UK 29 Q&A Q&A with David Hamblen In June, Michelle Ryder met up with David Hamblen, Sales Director UK&I at Altkin to discuss the company’s rebrand, its go-to-market strategy, as well as plans to expand and grow the business through sustainable practices and distribution partnerships. Here are edited highlights of the conversation Q: ARMOR has recently rebranded as Altkin. Can you explain the thinking behind the new name? A: Armor Group started way back in 1922, so just over 100 years ago, within the world of carbon paper, since then we’ve moved into many other categories including thermal transfer, and the print cartridges market. Certainly historically, from a transactional point of view Armor was a very well-known name, it was very much a Frenchbased company, and I think with the rebrand to Altkin, we are opening up the brand into the European marketplace. Altkin is the umbrella company under which a number of companies sit, we recently acquired THS otherwise known as Parsia in the UK, and there are more acquisitions to come. If you break down the Altkin name, we have Alt – being the alternative to the original and Kin meaning family – we are the Altkin family, and it’s also an anagram of ink. The company strapline is fair printing and we’re all about responsible printing, about remanufacturing, collections, closed loops and recycling. Q: The company is a long-standing vendor in the printing and office solutions market. More recently we’ve seen you expand market reach with the launch of new lines aimed at the MPS market in particular. Can you expand on the go-to-market strategy – particularly in the UK &I? A: We are very established within the transactional space, but customers throughout Europe, were starting to ask us for contractual ink and toner. So, five years ago, [the team in] our factory in Morocco, started to do research and development on A3 and A4 copier products. We now have over 700 SKUs in that range already, and that’s expanding all the time. These cover all the major brands – Canon, Ricoh, Kyocera, Konica Minolta, Sharp and many others. We have over 3,000 SKUs now in our range and there’s a huge roadmap of products coming through as well. We already have a good number of customers throughout Europe, some very high profile managed print resellers using our products, and what we want to do is open that opportunity out to more resellers around Europe to benefit from the quality, the sustainability and the lower cost per copy that these products can bring. Q: Sustainability is front and centre today and Altkin provides remanufactured products. What are the key advantages to both the end-user and the reseller? A: First and foremost, it’s about form, fit and function. So, what Altkin does is collect the OEM cores and remanufacture them – that includes cleaning, refilling new chip, etc. and what that means is it’ll work in the printer each and every time. What we find with a lot of our competitors in the marketplace is that they will use a compatible, so they will go out and build a new plastic core. Now that may or may not work in the printer every time, it is a little bit different. The company’s ethos is sustainability, we’re all about the collection of the empty cartridges right through to the reuse, or the recycling and zero landfill. All those boxes are ticked. It’s a closed loop solution as well. We even go as far as zero plastic packaging. Q: Resellers have lots of options, why choose Altkin products? A: Sustainability should certainly be at the top of the list for both resellers and end-users. We’ve spoken about the company’s heritage and over 100 years of history – 30 or more in the print industry. We also have a number of accreditations as a company – ISO 9001 for quality, 14001 for environmental and REACH compliance. There is also the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, which is an extremely difficult Sustainability should certainly be at the top of the list for both resellers and end-users continued... Photo: pixabay.com/Skyoverse
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