"Now, the entire world is talking about the global economic crisis, which unfortunately affects us, too. [...] increased presence and new market engagements will certainly bring the desired rise in sales and market share. How much it will be, I can not say, since nobody knows what the crisis will bring […],” the company's Managing Director for Serbia and Macedonia Ivanka Milenkovic told SeeNews in an interview.
She did not specify the company’s current market share in Macedonia.
The company's Skopje-based Macedonian unit is a subsidiary of Olympus Serbia. Olympus dooel Skopje is in charge of presentation and sales, and servicing medical equipment and microscopes.
"We have two distributors, one for the imaging programme (cameras, dictaphones, binoculars and accessories) and the other for the diagnostic programme (biochemical and immunochemical analyzers and reagents)”, Milenkovic said.
Olympus has recently presented a new generation of compact, high-precision digital cameras and dictaphones it will offer in Macedonia, a country of two million people. Milenkovic said cameras and dictaphones are the easiest to sell, which does not imply that the company is putting aside its other products.
Serbia, with its population of 7.5 million, is a more important market in financial terms for Olympus than Macedonia, said Milenkovic.
“Since 2002, when Olympus D.O.O Serbia was set up as a unit of Olympus Europe, we have been registering a two-digit sales growth, almost in each segment. So, the last fiscal year we posted a 14% growth. For this year, the growth target also is ambitious, but I would prefer to see how this fiscal year [April 1, 2008-March 30, 2009] would finish, in view of the financial crisis that has hit our region as well”, she said.
Olympus Serbia, including its Macedonian unit, posted a consolidated sales revenue of over 606 million Serbian dinars ($8.94 million/7.07 million euro) in the 2007 calendar year, up 24.7%, according to the company's consolidated financial report. Elsewhere in southeastern Europe, Olympus has subsidiaries in Romania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Olympus, known for its top quality optical products, has captured 80% of the world market of flexible endoscopes, said Milenkovic.
“[…] quality often goes hand-in-hand with higher prices, which may be a problem for lower budget environments. But, in the long-run, the customers recognize that quality allows easier work and bigger confidence, so they make a real choice […],” she said.
Olympus Corporation (www.olympus-global.com) was established in 1919, and initially specialized in microscope and thermometer businesses. Now, it is a leading producer of cameras, dictaphones, and medical devices in the world.
Olympus Corporation employs almost 33,000 people around the globe. In its last fiscal year, it registered a net sales revenue of $8.8 billion (6.96 billion euro), 8.6% up from a year earlier, company data showed. Olympus Europe posted a net sales revenue of $2.35 billion (1.86 billion euro) in the 2007 fiscal year.
(1 euro = 85.6554 dinars)
