BUSINESS BITS

Painless refills/Cordillera coffee
VERONICA UY AND DEXTER SEE

A market survey has shown that 70 percent of local companies agree that refilling their printer ink cartridge saves them money, but most don’t because of fear of damaging their printers. However, 95 percent said they would try if offered quality ink that won’t damage their machines.

Taking a cue from these survey results, Babylyn Decena-Newfield, the master franchiser in the Philippines of Cartridge World, decided to go into the ink refilling business despite the presence of strong competition offering lower prices.

“Ours will never be the lowest-priced ink refills but our customers are assured of a quality product, an ink that will work,” she says. “We are therefore reeducating the companies here about their options for ink refilling.”

She says that Cartridge World uses inks of the best quality from Germany, the United States, and Australia, and guarantees fixing any damage that its inks might do to printers. The quality of our refills is so similar to the original that it would be difficult to say which is which.

Unlike other ink refilling companies that inject a “universal ink” to all types of printer cartridges, Newfield says, Cartridge World offers 220 to 250 types of brand-specific inks for most brands of printers, particularly Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Canon, Epson, and Brother. HP alone, she says, has 20 different cartridges of different sizes.

“We have the inks for about 85 percent of existing printers,” she says. It’s not a full 100 percent only because some of the printers have become obsolete and are not manufactured anymore.”

The usual ink refills, she says, result in a “streaky, inconsistent output half of the time,” but not Cartridge World refills because the inks used are formulated for specific cartridges.

Newfield says the company has a 100-percent money back guarantee within 30 days of the refill service. She says: “We’re so confident of the quality of our service that if you’re not totally happy with it, we’d give you a full refund. We won’t question you at all. In addition, in the unlikely event that a cartridge we had refilled causes damage to the printing mechanism of your equipment, we fully reimburse you for the repair charges.”?

Newfield says that the other customer behavior Cartridge World wants to change is the habit of buying brand-new cartridges. This, she says, is a costly proposition considering that new cartridges are priced at least 30 percent higher than their corresponding ink refills.

She explains that as there are so many varieties of inks and cartridges, the amount of savings against buying new ink cartridges also varies. For non-laser printers, she says, the savings is 50 percent on the average based on three ink samples; for monochrome laser printers, 40 percent; and for color laser printers, 30 percent.

To ensure quality, Newfield says, the company pretests every cartridge before it is sold to ensure that the refills has a yield equal to if not bigger than that of the original cartridge. “The quality of our refills is so similar to the original that it would be difficult to say which is which,” she says.

Cartridge World was cited by Entrepreneur Magazine-United States in 2007 as the No.1 ink refilling business in the US, with some 1,500 franchise outlets in more than 40 countries. It entered the Philippine market last January by putting up its first store at Legaspi Vilalge in Makati City, later opening four more branches (Pasong Tamo Extension in Makati, Shaw Boulevard in Ortigas, Garnet Road in Ortigas Center, and Leviste St. in Salcedo Village), with another on Sucat Road in Paranaque due to open this October. Within the year, the company plans to also open branches in Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo, Negros, and Mindanao.

Newfield says the company’s target is to open 10 franchises every year. A franchised Cartridge World outlet is not of the kiosk type; instead, it is a full one-stop shop of about 60 square meters doing both retail and institutional sales. The shop is not restricted to doing ink refilling or re-manufacturing alone; for instance, Newfield says, it can be an Internet café or a shop that provides copying services.

The franchise fee is P1.5 million, inclusive of training of two persons in Australia for two weeks, a starter kit that includes the marketing materials, the ink refilling equipment, and the starting inventory.
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Stakeholders of the coffee industry here have united in their efforts to make the Cordillera Region as the "Arabica Coffee Capital of the Philippines."

This developed after the Regional Development Council in the Cordillera approved a resolution supporting the development of the Arabica coffee industry in the region.

The resolution stated that the Cordillera maintains a comparatively competitive advantage in the production of Arabica coffee, being one of the few areas where it can be sustainably grown.
In the region, Arabica coffee could be profitably grown only in Benguet, parts of Mountain Province, Ifugao and Kalinga. Arabica coffee commands a much higher price in the market over the other coffee varieties.

This is the reason the stakeholders have decided to promote the production of the crop among the thousands of coffee farmers in the different parts of the region.

Arabica coffee is considered one of the best coffee varieties in the world. It commands a premium status in the market if produced, processed and marketed qualitatively in accordance with global market standards.

The RDC said that the Cordillera has long been a producer of organically grown Arabica coffee but only in backyards, and there was never any coordination of efforts relative to promotion, training, research and support to develop its full potential.

In recent years though, Presidential Assistant for Cordillera affairs Tom Killip initiated the task of synchronizing and catalyzing these efforts to consolidate the development of the Arabica coffee industry in the region through the formation of municipal, provincial and regional coffee councils.

The RDC said that this is intended to coordinate and systematize the various efforts of all Arabica stakeholders in the region while empowering coffee growers and traders to form local enterprises that would promote and market the Cordillera Arabica coffee as a premium coffee in the market.
The development of an Arabica coffee industry in the region is a part of the revitalized anti-poverty program of the national government.