中文Komori has appointed Jacob Hummel as Chief Commercial Officer for Europe, effective 1 October. On the surface it is a routine senior hire. Read against the company’s own description of the role, it is something more consequential: a formal admission that the way presses are sold in Europe has to change.
Hummel arrives with roughly three decades of printing industry experience. His most recent post was General Manager of the Nordics business at Optimum Group, a label and flexible packaging converter — a customer-side role, not a supplier-side one. Before that he held sales, product and business development positions at HP, Cloudprinter and Heidelberg. That combination is unusual. Most press-vendor appointments come from within the vendor ecosystem; this one comes from someone who has bought equipment, run a converting business and carried a P&L on the other side of the table.
The mandate he inherits is explicit. Komori intends to move from being primarily a traditional press supplier toward becoming a provider of integrated production solutions, connecting offset and digital printing more closely with postpress, automation, software and service. The company’s framing is that these technologies should be presented as components of a single production environment rather than as separate products bought on separate purchase orders.
That shift sounds like marketing language until you follow its implications for the sales organisation. If a press is a product, the sales conversation is about specification, price, delivery and financing. If a production environment is the product, the conversation starts with the customer’s business model — run lengths, job mix, labour availability, turnaround commitments, the cost of a makeready hour — and only then arrives at equipment. It requires salespeople who can read a plant’s bottleneck, not just a spec sheet. It also lengthens sales cycles and changes how success is measured, because the value being sold is throughput and cost per sheet rather than impressions per hour.
Komori International, based in Utrecht, also plans to tighten coordination among its European subsidiaries, sales partners and product divisions so that market intelligence, customer requirements and commercial opportunities move through the organisation faster. Anyone who has watched a Japanese press manufacturer’s European operation will recognise the friction being addressed here: excellent engineering, distributed through independent partners, with customer insight that travels slowly back to the factory.
Hummel’s stated priorities are to develop the European sales organisation, grow market share, enter additional markets and expand solution-based selling. The order is telling. Organisation first, then share, then new markets. Restructuring a sales force to sell outcomes before asking it to sell into new territories is the sequence that usually works; the reverse sequence usually produces a lot of activity and very little margin.
There is an industry-wide context here that goes beyond Komori. Sheetfed offset is a mature technology in a mature market. The difference between two well-built presses from credible manufacturers, measured on print quality alone, is smaller than the difference either of them can make to a plant’s overall economics when paired with the right workflow, the right finishing line and the right scheduling software. That is why every major manufacturer is now selling integration, and why the language of the industry has drifted from “machines” to “ecosystems”, from “installed base” to “production environment”.
For European printers, the practical question is what a solutions-led sales approach means at the negotiating table. It usually means more discovery, more plant visits and more involvement from software and postpress specialists before a proposal appears. It also means the proposal is harder to compare against a rival quote, because it bundles workflow and service into the capital number. Buyers should insist on seeing the assumptions behind the productivity claims — run lengths used, makeready times assumed, operator skill levels required — or the comparison collapses into marketing.
Komori’s appointment will not change the presses it builds. It may change how the company decides which problems it is trying to solve for a customer, and that is where the commercial differentiation increasingly lives.
There is a specific risk in solution selling that Komori’s customers should watch for. When a vendor bundles presses, workflow software, finishing and service into a single proposition, the bundle becomes difficult to price against alternatives, and the buyer loses the ability to see where the value actually sits. The defence is to ask for the bundle to be decomposed: what does the press cost alone, what does the workflow layer cost alone, what is the service commitment worth annually, and what happens to the total if a third-party finishing line is substituted. Vendors that can answer those questions cleanly are usually the ones whose integration claims are real rather than rhetorical.
The appointment also says something about where European press demand is concentrated. The Nordic and label markets Hummel knows best are small, highly automated and technically demanding, with converters who buy on total cost of ownership because labour is expensive and run lengths are short. A sales leader formed in that environment will tend to talk about makeready minutes and operator hours rather than impressions per hour. Whether Komori’s European dealer network can deliver that conversation consistently is the open question, and it is the one that will determine whether the new commercial strategy produces orders or just presentations.
Source: Inkish — https://inkish.news/en/article/komori-names-jacob-hummel-european-cco-as-it-pushes-beyond-the-press
