Coastal Image Technologies, a Mombasa-based business which has been making compatible toner cartridges for the last 12 years, has transformed into a “technology enterprise” with ties to global brands.
The story of the company’s success was published in a recent newspaper article in Business Daily’s Enterprise section.
The article described how two brothers, Mohamed Mustafa Somji and Mohamed Abbas, “stepped out of the common craze for tourism-linked entrepreneurship to build a multi-million-shilling professional toner cartridge empire”.
“In 2005, I discovered that photocopying businesses had no place to replace their toner cartridges and often had to buy new ones,” explained Mustafa.
With this realisation, the two brothers came up with a plan for a new business, in which they invested 100,000 shillings ($989/€805). Their goal was straight-forward – to create a remanufacturing company “that would make quality compatible toner cartridges, significantly cut their costs and make them affordable to a larger consumer base.”
“Setting up systems and processes that would deliver this dream was our greatest challenge,” recalled Mustafa.
“It has been a journey of many challenges that we would not have survived without our team of employees and loyal customers,” he went on to say.
Gaining clients was a major hurdle initially, which Mustafa attributed to the fact that the business was a start-up, and “its efficiency untested.” This first stumbling block led the two brothers to seek foreign expertise “that came in the form of training in the USA”.
Training completed, the brothers returned to Kenya “to build what has become one of the most trusted service providers” in the country, specialising not just in toner cartridges now but also in laptops, desktop computers and photocopiers.
Since its humble beginnings, the business has developed into “a busy operation” which has gained several certificates over the years, as well as clinching deals with “local distributors of international IT brands” such as Microsoft, HP, Canon and Acer.
“In 2013, we became the official partner for HP brands and in 2014 we received Gold partnership from Lenovo that enabled us to sell their brands. We have a certified partnership with Microsoft Corporation, which enables us to sell genuine Microsoft products,” explained Mustafa.
Just two years ago the company received another boost when it was ranked number 18 in the annual Business Daily and KPMG Top 100 SMEs survey, which Mustafa said “opened a new chapter for the business attracting new customers who are now driving its expansion agenda.”
