Fujitsu PC set for further growth at new site

Fujitsu PC Australia has moved to bigger, brighter premises after approximately tripling local revenues over the last three and a half years.

Brooke Costello, Australasia marketing communications manager at Fujitsu PC, said the company had expanded since starting its Sydney office up about three and a half years ago.

"To approximate, business has roughly tripled overall," she said.

However, Costello said she could not release actual figures without confirmation from a regional office in Singapore. No confirmation had yet been received at press-time.

Costello said Fujitsu PC had moved from Sydney's CBD to corporate IT centre North Ryde -- the "Silicon Valley of Sydney". The company had acquired premises three or four times larger than the CBD site, she said.

"We're looking at some [further] expansion plans and some new HR (human resources) plans," she said. "When Fujitsu PC was launched four years ago, there was almost half the HR component there is now."

Adrian Mead, marketing manager at Fujitsu PC, said the vendor had begun local operations with about three people but now had eight. Four were in sales, two in marketing and a couple more worked in administration, he said.

"The company has expanded and is increasing the number of things we do in Australia," he said.

Mead said Fujitsu PC had seen "definite" growth in its main education vertical. Recent growth had been especially strong in Victoria, he added.

"It has been dominated by a couple of players, but we have sort of come out of nowhere and taken a large slice of it," Mead said. "We intend to expand that nationally."

The new North Ryde premises were a better "strategic fit" for Fujitsu PC than the CBD. Because North Ryde housed so many IT companies, that made it easier for Fujitsu to work with its partners and customers, Mead pointed out.

New opportunities would also be explored via those partnerships, he added.

"In Japan, Fujitsu is number one in many areas. We're going to get access to lots of converged devices, such as LCD TVs and that type of thing," Mead said. "One LCD TV has PC functionality built in."

That would appeal to customers who wanted to simplify their home entertainment setup or network, employing one device to do the job of many discrete boxes, he pointed out.

Fujitsu PC expected a broader portfolio to become available locally around the end of the year. The local division would work to maximise the opportunities that resulted, he added.

Mead said Fujitsu PC was particularly strong in notebooks and tablets. It claims to be one of the only companies that offers a convertible tablet PC as well as a standard model.

Those strengths should help it increasingly target verticals such as utilities, healthcare and consultancies, he said.

Costello said anyone who needed handhelds or had travelling sales teams or field forces could benefit from a bigger range of converged devices.

Parent company Fujitsu reported net sales of 1,026,339 million Yen ($11,855 million) for the first quarter ending 30 June 2005, up 1.8 percent on the same quarter in 2004.

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