Fuji Xerox is aiming to be the top player in printers and copiers in the nascent market of Myanmar within three years, after it opened a new office in Yangon on April 1.

Although the top spot is currently occupied by rival Japanese firm Canon, Fuji Xerox’s corporate vice president Masashi Honda said his company expects to wrest that title over with closer support for clients expanding into the country.

“Myanmar has a higher total population than Korea, and we foresee very high opportunity in this market,” he told reporters in Singapore last Thursday.

The company sold 2,500 multi-function print and copy devices in 2012, and expects to sell about 3,000 this year. With the new business operations in place, Fuji Xerox expects to sell 20,000 multi-function devices annually by 2022.

Previously, the company’s presence in Myanmar was limited to sales activities through a local dealer.

The new Yangon office will enable Fuji Xerox to work closer with the same local dealer in carrying out sales and consulting services, as well as make a push for the company’s more premium products such as high-speed colour publishing systems.

This is especially important for global clients such as other international corporations looking to expand into Myanmar, said Honda, as the local dealer cannot provide the level of quality support required.

Although Myanmar has seen some reforms since it elected a new government in 2011, doing business in the country is still considered risky, not least because of the political climate.

Yoshio Hanada, newly-appointed general manager of the Myanmar branch, told Techgoondu he foresees quite a number of challenges.

For one, there are infrastructural issues such as reliable Internet access. The technical knowledge of staff on the ground is also important, and the company has taken on an all-local staff in Myanmar in part to train them.

“The situation in Myanmar is still changing, and we will remain flexible and monitor our progress,” Hanada said.

Fuji Xerox currently sits at the top of the printer and photo copier market in Asia Pacific, but the Japanese company is determined to move into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space.

Take its Scan Translation Service (pictured above), a cloud service that multinational corporations dealing with large amounts of foreign-language documents may find useful.

Pop a document into a Fuji Xerox copier, and an image of the document is scanned into the cloud. Advanced optical character recognition software identifies text in the image, converts it into plain text and runs it through third-party translation software.

In under a minute a new document pops out, either in the same copier or another networked copier across the globe, its format and layout intact but with text fully translated.

Users can choose to replace the text with a new specified language, or have the translated version displayed in smaller font above the original language.

Like any other machine translator, the result is not perfect. Instead, the aim of the service is to give readers the gist of the document, which could be useful in a number of ways.

If an office worker has to sort through dozens of foreign-language documents a day, knowing the key message of each will speed up the process. Managers can also identify documents which they think are most important before getting a proper translation of a select few.

The scan translation service also works seamlessly with Working Folder, Fuji Xerox’s cloud storage service. Documents stored in Working Folder can be sent to the copier for translation, and documents translated at the copier can be uploaded directly to Working Folder.

Unfortunately, the service is limited to only a four languages at the moment: Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Plus, translation is only available through Japanese. A user cannot, say, translate a document from Chinese to Korean.

As businesses continue to cater to the needs of mobile workers, the need to print paper might disappear altogether but it remains to be seen if Fuji Xerox’s attempts at breaking into SaaS will pay off.

In 2011, a significant 67 per cent of Fuji Xerox’s revenue comes from sales of office copiers and printers.

We already know how great the large-screen smartphone or tablet computer is as a remote controller to play music or movies from your PC server. Now, there’s also an iOS app that lets you control your Xerox machine and send documents to print – directly from your handheld device.

Unveiled today by Fuji Xerox, the free app on Apple’s AppStore enables users to do what many smartphone users often can’t do after viewing a document – print it.

With the app, they get to select the print mode (say, for a photo or webpage) and print settings, like whether to print in mono or colour, and to select which paper tray and paper type. In other words, a whole lot of features you’d expect from the print menu from your PC, whether you actually use them or not.

What’s more interesting is the multi-language support, which includes Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, besides English, so the app will be great for East Asian users.

On its own, the app is no big deal unless you’re an iPhone/iPad user who happens to have a Xerox machine nearby. However, it’s yet another sign of the smartphone taking over remote control functions where it traditionally was not well-known for.