It’s “Business Unusual” for Kornit Digital

As the world get accustomed to the “new normal”, industrial textile is showing signs of recovery. We catch up with Andy Yarrow, President for Kornit Digital Asia Pacific, and chat about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of digital textile printing in the region.

1. How has Kornit been doing to cope in recent times? How has Kornit been able to support your customers?

We moved pretty quickly to a mantra of “Business Unusual”: changing our marketing focus to more online activities, intensifying our use of social media platforms and of course as customers couldn’t travel, we’ve done a huge amount of video demonstrations. There isn’t a day goes by where Skype, Teams, or Zoom aren’t used for a discussion! It’s actually been a great help to have all this great technology available to us as we completely rebuilt our China sales team, and have remote customers and Kornit staff across the region, so the only way to really connect with them is via Zoom. It’s not ideal, but we would be in a very different place without it for sure. From a business perspective we are obviously living in uncertain times, so being creative with how we put deals together, being more flexible with payment terms, etc., has really helped. With regard to how we support our customers, we’ve retrained some of our Field Service Engineers in the region to be able to better support our customers remotely, and also crossedtrained them to assist the applications team in our Hong Kong demo facility, as the number of requests for sample

prints has exploded in recent times.

2. According to a new IDC report, not only is industrial textile showing signs of recovery, Asia Pacific is contributing a lot to that growth. What are your thoughts on that?

For sure there are huge changes across the entire planet, not just in Asia. What we are seeing in Asia Pacific is movement into - what at least for Kornit - are less traditional manufacturing hubs, such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Bangladesh. These are markets that we didn’t really spend a huge amount of time focusing on before. These are typically expensive countries to manufacture in, but with the previous reliance on China and current geopolitical issues, many countries are looking at other options closer to home.

China on the other hand is continuing to grow and focus on their domestic market, so the movement across the board for Asia Pacific is pretty significant.

3. Globally, what factors are contributing to this growth?

The global megatrends that Kornit has been speaking about for the past 18 months are contributing to the growth. The trends include self-expression, sustainability, and of course, for our customers the ‘retail meltdown’ that is driving customers to spend more online. The fact that people have been locked indoors for months has absolutely accelerated this.

Typically everyone is connected to a gadget these days, which makes it very easy to quickly order something online. It’s pretty common knowledge that especially in the United States, many of Kornit’s customers are focused on e-commerce. Combine this with huge numbers of people staying at home, and some of the current world events and causes, such as the US election, the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, plus coronavirus, people are ordering more and more garments to express themselves and make a statement.

Of course, we also made the announcement recently about the acquisition of Custom Gateway which is enabling Kornit users all around the world to connect with each other, and most importantly their customers.

It’s “Business Unusual” for Kornit Digital

Custom Gateway is going to be a great solution for our customers in Asia Pacific.

Generally most of our customers operate a B2B type of business, so this has clearly been affected by COVID-19. I genuinely believe that with Custom Gateway we will enable Kornit customers to take their businesses B2C and on to the next level; putting themselves front and centre and enabling business transactions from anywhere in the world.

4. Recently we spoke with Indonesia’s Nonek Clothing on their Kornit Storm HD6 upgrade. How about an update on your major markets in the Asia Pacific region?

China is well and truly back to work, and we are making great progress there. Japan is a little more reserved and is still picking up, but the market there is pretty conservative as we know. We have seen several of Kornit's global strategic partners expanding into Japan, so it's clear that the market remains key for us, we just need to be patient as it recovers.

Australia had a great surge of business recently, which we are really excited about. South East Asia markets like Indonesia and The Philippines are recovering and getting back to work slowly, and as I said, we’re seeing some great movement in Vietnam which is very exciting for us. That’s the great thing about Asia Pacific, all the markets are so diverse it keeps us on our toes.

We are seeing success in Australia, Japan, China, Vietnam, India and others. We will let you know about those as soon as we can, for now I am keeping quiet (for once).

5. Any last messages?

Ronen Samuel, our CEO, talks a lot about the “inflection point”, and despite all the terrible things that are Andy Yarrow, President for Kornit Digital Asia Pacific

happening across the globe we can genuinely see the positive impact that COVID-19 has had on the textile industry’s shift from analogue to digital. The global megatrends of selfexpression, sustainability and the shift to e-commerce have really accelerated this transition, and we believe that Kornit is positioned perfectly to enable our customers to take full advantage.