enx magazine

It’s been a year of change at Toshiba America Business Solutions Inc. (TABS) with significant changes in upper management beginning with the departure earlier this year of President Rick Taylor. With that departure, Mark Mathews was promoted to president and COO while Toshifumi Matsumoto was named chairman and CEO.

Mathews has been with Toshiba since 1993, most recently serving as TABS’ vice president/general manager, EID, where he was responsible for overseeing EID’s strategic operations. An astute observer of the imaging equipment industry, Mathews is well positioned from a technology and strategic perspective to lead the company going forward. Recently, ENX had an opportunity to speak with Mathews about his new position, Toshiba, and some of the latest developments in the office equipment industry.

You’ve been in this new position for a couple of months now. How’s it going so far?

Mathews: So far it’s going fantastic. It’s been very busy. We’ve had several great accomplishments. We had a great dealer meeting in March with all of our customers seeing our new product line. That went very well. We just finished our fiscal year in the month of March and ended up having very good revenue and profitability results. Lastly, we made some transitions in the leadership team. Overall, we’re well postured for a very good fiscal year going into ’08.

This seems to be a great opportunity for you. How confident are you with the team surrounding you going forward?

Mathews: We’ve had a lot of significant changes here. First of all, Toshi Matsumoto was appointed our CEO. He’s a very seasoned MFP executive and has been stationed in the United States multiple times. So in terms of our CEO, we could not have gotten a better and more experienced person. That’s great news for us. We have a lot of bench strength in the company and have the ability to promote from within, and we made a couple of significant promotions. Steve Rhorer was promoted from vice president of marketing to my old role, vice president and general manager of EID, which is our wholesaler dealer business. He’s very well known and liked within the dealer community and we think that’s a very positive promotion. The other significant one we did was the promotion of Mike Mathé, who is now heading up our newly formed International Division. We’ve had some really good sales success in Central and South America and due to that success, we’re elevating that to a business unit.

What do you see as your biggest challenge in this new role?

Mathews: Dealing with this changing market. There’s a lot of things going on in the market and this industry. Color is pretty far

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