Top VARs Q&A: Mark Smyth, Apogee

COO of 24th-ranked Top VAR opens up on the post-COVID demand landscape for managed print providers

This Q&A features in CRN Top VARs 2020, which you can read here. Alternatively, you can read the individual profiles here.

Apogee is the UK's largest managed print provider. How badly did lockdown hit managed print volumes, and what's the picture moving into 2021?

Some sectors were up and some were significantly down. [Overall] volumes were about 44 per cent in April and then as we came out of lockdown they got back to around the 70 per cent mark. The target for everyone was getting back to 80 per cent. But as we headed into a second wave of lockdown that slowly headed back down, with hospitality, legal and finance taking the biggest hits.

We're really fortunate to have a very large part of the NHS and healthcare, and those parts of our business remained quite strong. In some cases parts of the NHS were way over their normal month by month print volumes.

What does this mean for the long-term health of the sector?

If you're in sectors that are hit significantly, such as legal and finance, you'll see some recovery, but that will take time. And if the new normal is 80 per cent of pre-COVID levels, or even 70 per cent, that's going to be a challenge for small businesses if they don't have strength and depth in other sectors or technologies to support them.

Is ‘the new normal' fuelling any new opportunities for managed print players?

It's meant in some cases we've been able to come up with some new technologies, whether it's in the office or at home, and that's both on hardware and software. And we've tried where we can to offer organisations - regardless of where their workforce is - some synergy and some alternatives that take some of the pain points away from them.

Apogee was a multi-vendor print provider ahead of its acquisition by HP in 2018. Has that changed?

We're still engaged with pretty much all the top vendors, whether it's Ricoh, Xerox, Konica Minolta or Kyocera. It's no secret that of course we lead from an MPS perspective with an HP product. But while we are a wholly owned subsidiary of HP, day to day we operate independently. It's about growth of our business, which in turn delivers shareholder value.

You joined as COO in 2019. What are your priorities in your role?

Our focus for FY2021 is ‘optimise', ‘grow' and ‘new'. That means optimising our existing MSP offering, expanding the services with existing clients, and adding new services.