How Toshiba diversified revenue streams

When you think of Toshiba, you might imagine the pioneering Japanese consumer electronics company, famous for manufacturing items like the Black Stripe TV and the Toshiba T110, which it pitched as the world’s first mass-market laptop, during the 1970s and 1980s. Following a high-profile corporate scandal, the company went private in 2023.

Today, the conglomerate’s subsidiaries traffic in everything from power and infrastructure to IT. One of its units, Toshiba America Business Solutions (TABS), which sells enterprise print solutions, is looking to diversify—something that its parent company has proven it’s very good at.

This pivot includes software innovation and digital signage for stadiums, and the early signs are positive: TABS says market share in its core business is growing, and revenue increased 31% YoY. Revenue Brew spoke with two of its executives on achieving growth amid an environment where information channels are rapidly evolving.

Printing money

Due to growing digitization, the printing business is shrinking, and TABS CEO Larry White isn’t afraid to admit it.

“The first thing you have to do when you’re in a declining market is protect your core business, because [if] you can’t do that, you can’t move into the other key areas,” White said.

TABS has started offering maintenance services for all, not just Toshiba, printer products. Innovation has also proven critical: TABS has found a growing niche in printing, like ticketing for postal packages, and now sells receipt printing devices.

“If you take a look at a market that’s declining between 4%–5% per year, and you’re growing another piece of that exact same market by 10% per year, you’re doing a good job,” White said.

White said TABS’s growing market share is allowing the company to be creative in other spaces, namely everyone’s favorite abbreviation: B2B SaaS.

Adapting to the future

Following the advent of the internet, Toshiba quickly realized that the way people interacted with physical documents was going to fundamentally change. Bill Melo, TABS vice president of marketing and strategic business development, said that to adapt his company invested in a cloud-based enterprise document storage solution.

“Our principal business is not making copiers and printing pages, it’s managing information, and we saw very clearly that the screens were replacing physical paper,” Melo said.

For example, TABS has a contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has a number of students or parents who do not speak English and use Toshiba products to translate documents at scale.

“You can scan a document in English, for example, and have it printed out in 193 different languages each for the use of the family,” Melo said.

The latest iteration of its cloud-based document management is the “Elevate Sky Workflow” application, which leverages AI.

The company is also growing by looking backward a little. Toshiba’s history as a TV manufacturer is rearing its head, as it tests the digital stadium banner waters. This is just the latest example of the “no stone unturned” culture the company has created.

Expert insight: copy and print industry

Keith Kmetz, VP at market research firm IDC, has spent years researching the copy and print space and praised Toshiba’s messaging and adaptation around being a digital document hub. He argued the same principles that made the company effective for physical documents also translate to the digital space.

“Whether that’s in physical paper form or digital form…we’re still going to play in both of those markets respectfully. For a company like Toshiba, it’s a natural extension of what they’ve been doing for years,” Kmetz said.

He also said Toshiba’s latest push into digital signage is a great strategic pivot with translatable skills.

“Digital signage is just another way to communicate information,” Kmetz said. “If you think about the print copy industry, that’s always been in a paper form, but signage is a way to communicate information, but it’s just in a different form, so I think it’s a natural extension.”

Lastly, he emphasized the importance of Toshiba’s push to defend its market share in its core business, even as it is shrinking.

“The market has talked about the paperless office for broadly 50, 60 years now. It hasn’t gone away. We’re still printing hundreds of billions of pages every year, but we have to recognize there’s a maturity,” Kmetz said.