By Patrick Avenell
Panasonic Australia this morning confirmed the departure of Mark Deere-Jones, the former director of its Business Systems Group. Deere-Jones had been in this role for four years after starting with Panasonic in 2007.
“Mark helped grow awareness of the Panasonic brand amongst the Australian businesses and we would like to thank him for his contribution,” said Panasonic Australia MD Steve Rust.
“The position will be a much coveted one and we will now spend time ensuring we have the right candidate.”
Panasonic’s business-to-business range includes Toughbook computers and tablets, commercial televisions and entertainment products, in-car batteries and in-flight entertainment systems, among other product ranges.
Its client base includes government departments, the military-industrial complex and the mining and educations sectors, among other industries.
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One of Deere-Jones’ responsibilities during his time at Panasonic was the integration of Sanyo Oceania’s business-to-business divisions after the global acquisition in 2009. Towards the end of this process, Deere-Jones told Appliance Retailer magazine that this had been a successful transition.
“It’s been seamless so far,” he said in early 2012. “From a product point of view, the factories have been discussing this for a fair while. From a people point of view, the projector market is a big market, so we knew different people in the market. We knew different strengths and weaknesses — we were very pleased that the Sanyo staff was happy to come across to us.”
Deere-Jones also said that completing the Sanyo integration would open up new markets for Panasonic’s Business Systems Group.
“It offers us a big opportunity in the portable market, which Panasonic didn’t have before; It offers us a good opportunity in the value end because we have some high-end LCD models that we will be developing with Sanyo; and our real strength is education, and where it’s really helped Panasonic is [in] ultra short throw projectors, which was a huge gap for us.”
Another imitative Deere-Jones was pursuing was the trial of Toughbook notebooks and tablets in general retail.