Dynabook GM James Robbins Aims To ‘Double The Business’ With 'Channel-First, Channel-Best' Strategy

'We have some very lofty goals. I've been asked to double the business this next year, and so that's going to fall pretty heavily on the shoulders of the channel,' Dynabook Americas General Manager James Robbins tells CRN.

Dynabook Americas General Manager James Robbins told CRN he aims to double the company’s revenue this year by embracing a “channel-first, channel-best” strategy that leverages the reach of partners to accelerate growth.

“One of the first things we did is kind of put a flag in the ground and have stated, and have lived by a channel-first, channel-best strategy,” he told CRN. “I’d rather go use the channel and all their salespeople as a force multiplier so that we can drive the scale that my leadership is expected of me … We have some very lofty goals. I've been asked to double the business this next year, and so that’s going to fall pretty heavily on the shoulders of the channel.”

Over the last four years Dynabook has changed names and hands. It is owned by Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturing provider. Foxconn owns Sharp, which acquired 80.1 percent of the Toshiba computer business in 2018 and the remaining 19.9 percent in August 2020. In January, Foxconn reported annual revenue of $208.2 billion. Dynabook’s revenue is not reported separately.

Robbins said regardless of how the names have changed, the DNA of the company and its history of innovation is the same.

“Forty years ago, the T1100 was the laptop. In 1985 we brought it to market. It was nine pounds. It ran DOS. It was using an 8088 processor, with 4.7 megahertz. Think about just how far we have come,” he told CRN. “You know, we have laptops that are just a little bit over a pound now.”

He expects the refresh demand to explode in 2025 and that gives Dynabook an opportunity to take share with its devices that boast a fail rate of less than one percent annualized. Robbins said because Dynabook is owned by Foxconn, it is able to more closely observe quality controls on its products.

“Dell, HP, Lenovo, and everybody else use third-party manufacturing. A lot of them engineer outside of their organization. A lot of them don't do the testing,” he told CRN. “Where we see that really kind of where the rubber meets the road is when we look at the quality of the products and the durability. We have some of the lowest failure rates in the industry. Our annualized failure rate is less than 1 percent.”

Robbins said about 85 percent of the company's revenue moves through the channel and that includes large deals. He said one of Dynabook's biggest enterprise deals with a major automotive manufacturer moves through a channel partner.

“There are 67 million PCs that are going to have to be refreshed just in education. Everything that was purchased as COVID was kicking off, those devices now are four and five years old, getting towards the end of their meaningful life,” he said.

After working as a consultant for a number of months, Dynabook hired Marc Sarver to take over as the company’s channel chief in December. He told CRN as part of Dynabook’s 2025 partner program enhancements, the company is catering to the solution provider who can address small deals as well as the larger ones.

“Everybody has time to focus in on the 10 million deal, but when it comes to selling 5, 10, 15 25, laptops, it gets a little more challenging for these solution providers that are trying to focus in on technology sales,” he said. “How do they focus in on categories like that and still enable themselves to make money doing it? We created an entire channel program to enable this.”

Sarver said the company created 24 SKUs called Easy Buy to meet demand for its best-selling devices. Additionally, the company has built in discounting through its distribution partners to make it worth their effort to buy Dynabook. Additionally, Dynabook has stocked inventory with TD Synnex and D&H Distributing.

“What that does is it guarantees that our strategic partners and the folks that sit in our channel program that they’re able to make money even at volumes as low as two units,” he said. “They can still make good margin on the product. To be honest, nobody wants to wait two or three weeks to get three notebooks, or five notebooks. They need something today. They need it quickly. So we made the investments up front on this inventory and these easy buys”

To organize all the content and collateral, Dynabook said it opened a partner portal for access to logos, merchandizing images, case studies, as well as real business use such as deal registration at “the click of a button” without the need to reach a salesperson. The portal also offers partners access to tech support for the devices and all of the content in the portal can be co-branded with the partner’s logo

“We have an email tool built into our portal that we can even do the email for them, if they wish,” Sarver said. “So we really try to take that heavier lift, that sales motion, and make it as easy as possible for the solution providers who are really challenged in this day and age of focusing on this hardware sale.”

There are two partner levels in the new program, preferred and strategic. Each one has its benefits and Sarver said they are aggressively recruiting partners to help meet the demand they see in the market.

“From a financial standpoint, the preferred tier gets you right up front, out of the gate, a 5 percent discount like immediately, right off the top. That's great in the notebook world, that's a pretty solid discount up front on lower volume,” he told CRN.

Dynabook partners can rely on the deals because its products are harder to find in consumer markets, he told CRN.

“We are not overly distributed into the e-commerce marketplaces and others. You'll find that with a lot of other the brands that are out there,” he said. “So when it comes to channel conflict, vendors like to talk about their omnichannel strategy, but you start digging into it, and you find this stuff so overly distributed, it's very challenging for a solution provider. And that's really what we're leaning into.”