PEOPLE IN PRINT
Being part of a “seismic change” Asher Levy, who recently took on the role of active chairman at Landa Digital Printing, joined the company to be a part of its lead in innovation
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arlier this year, Asher Levy was named active chairman at Landa Digital Printing (LDP). Previously the CEO of Orbotech Ltd, Levy joined LDP at a time of great opportunity, but also faced unforeseen challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting most global industries. Speaking about his first few months with the company, Levy provided AP with insight into this transition for the print industry, his role at LDP, and his future plans for the business.
Q: Given a long and distinguished career at Orbotech what were your reasons for joining LDP?
Asher Levy (AL): I was heavily influenced by my first meeting with Benny Landa in 2019. Benny visited us at Orbotech and gave a brief presentation about LDP – I was simply fascinated by what he shared. We then kept in contact and later in the year, Benny invited me to join the company as active chairman. I joined the company as Benny himself is very impressive. Secondly, I did some research of my own and looked at the company, the technology, the addressable market size and then the wider industry. At that point, I realised that the opportunity for nanography could be huge. In business, not many people can say that they were a part of a revolution, or a seismic change within an industry. Of course, I wanted to be a part of it.
Q: What are your responsibilities in the role of active chairman?
AL:
In its broadest terms, it is to complement, support and to be a true partner to the CEO. In the dayto-day, that means that I have an active
role in business development planning, as well as helping to define all strategic initiatives as to long-term product and growth strategies. What’s more, it also means preparing the company for its next key initiatives – whether that be in raising capital or hiring senior personnel. In addition, and together with the CEO and its founder, my role is also to underpin the company’s values and its culture.
Q: Not long after you joined the company, the world was hit by COVID-19 – how did that impact your first few months?
AL:
Well, COVID-19 has had a huge and profound impact on the whole world, so it naturally dominated my time, especially as I was also acting as the interim CEO. The pandemic’s impact was felt in every area of the business, with many questions for us to answer, such as, how do we now communicate with customers? How do we demonstrate our presses? What happens now that drupa 2020 has postponed? And critically, how do we continue to support customers in the field? And in answering those questions, I have to say that I was impressed by how the business responded. The management team did an amazing job in reacting quickly, making swift changes to limit any long-term financial impact. Travel was instantly shut down, including in Asia Pacific, and physical meetings became a challenge. Our comprehensive service infrastructure that includes both remote support offered by our centre in Israel, together with our experienced local engineers in the field, proved its effectiveness and adeptly handled, and is handling, the challenge of keeping our customers operational and trained up.
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We also quickly and nimbly transformed our ongoing onsite customer visits and press demonstrations to ongoing full scale online demo events – which on the positive side, has enabled more of the industry to publically access the information about our presses and technology that they want. In addition, our wider team also worked very quickly and smartly to address the other key challenges too. Crucially, we hired experienced local engineers in the field to support our customers and to keep them operational. In hindsight, the pandemic definitely fast-tracked my on-boarding process, and this meant that I very quickly got to know the business. And while COVID-19 continues to be a challenge, I can’t think of one situation where the team wasn’t able to find a viable solution for a problem.
Q: What were your initial key observations about the business?
AL:
There are many. If I start with culture, some companies make you feel like everyone is replaceable, but this isn’t Benny’s way. LDP is all about its people and this makes you feel very comfortable and welcome from day one. My other lasting impression has been one of opportunity. We’ve clearly got a superior solution that aggressively answers market needs, presenting a huge opportunity for us and for our customers. We’re now in the execution phase, which brings other challenges, but I now know that these are all within our control. I am confident that we have the talent and professionalism within our team to successfully conclude this phase, even within a pandemic.
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