Posted on Wed, Feb 10, 2010
News & Notes. Here were a few more sounds bites that I found interesting from the Lyra Symposium....
- Intel purchases more ‘green' power than any other company in North America. LaserNetworks is proudly ‘green powered' through Bullfrog Power & it's great to see so many companies paying attention to the environment. Congratulations to Brendan Peters & the guys at Intel.
- Second note on Intel...they have MIB technology that could substantially improve the ease & amount of information on a device. Cheers to Canon for picking it up...unfortunately, most of the other manufacturers are dragging their collective heals suggesting their IP is too important. Sounds a bit like Apple-MSFT, until MSFT began to open things up! Hopefully we don't need to wait another 20 years to pass these benefits on to our customers.
- The Managed Print Services Association was established late last year & already has more than 500 members. Congrats to Jim Fitzpatrick who is leading the charge & doing a great job. It's an honour to be a board member representing the Dealer Channel.
- Remanufactured toner for colour printers/MFPs increased at a rate of 35% in 2009 vs. 2008. Three drivers were cited for this growth: price increases from the OEM companies; toner/product constraints; improved technology/reliability of the remanufactured product.
- There are many ‘shades of green' when it comes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) around the environment. Many of the larger companies are tracking their results, even when they're not perfect (congrats to HP on this one). Very disappointed that Ricoh published their CSR report...some confusing charts but not a single word about the environment. Wonder if there's a correlation between their lack of environmental awareness & their huge revenue drop in 2009? Excluding Ikon, Ricoh's revenue declines over the past four quarters have been: down 25%, down 30%, down 24%, down 26%.
- In 2009, the biggest companies in the print/copy space were HP @ $24billion (print only), Canon @ $23billion (excludes their Oce acquisition), Ricoh @ $17billion (includes Ikon), and Xerox @ $15billion.
- ‘Danger Zone' companies according to Lyra include Kyocera Mita, Sharp, & Toshiba...small percentage of their company's revenue with declining share and minimal investment in printing/copying R&D.
- Xerox acquisition of ACS is very different from HP's acquisition of EDS. ACS is in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) where EDS was true IT Outsourcing. ACS will represent approximately 30% of the combined revenue with almost 60% of the total employees.
- Memjet will arrive one day...a very exciting product that could truly impact productivity in the office. This deserves its own blog!
- Lexmark have some great new products & were recently awarded Buyer's Lab Mono MFP Line of The Year. Unfortunately for them, the timing of the global recession & the slowdown in hardware purchases has limited any significant marketshare growth for the company.
Posted on Mon, Nov 16, 2009
As we have seen lately, there is a fair amount of consolidation in the copier & printer marketplace. We have seen Ricoh acquire Ikon in an effort to ‘push' more Ricoh equipment. We have seen HP and Canon team-up in the belief that partnering will result in the sale of more equipment. This week, we saw Canon in the news with its acquisition of Oce. Again, the acquisition appears to have been made in an effort to sell more hardware...this time in the production printing space.
Here's the link... http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091116/bs_nm/us_oce
It appears many of the copier-based companies have come to the realization that there is far too much capacity in the market. At a conference last week, a Xerox VP noted customers have far too much copy/print capacity and the market for 60+ page/minute devices "were sinking like a stone while the workgroup MFPs (20-50 page/minute devices) were continuing to increase in popularity." We have seen this product shift with our customers for the past several years. In addition, we're seeing the life expectancy (reliability) of workgroup devices extend well beyond the traditional 3-5 year useful life of those higher speed copier devices.
With the recent poor financial performance from Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh, it appears the copier industry is set for more consolidation and partner agreements. Across the industry, beyond the negative trends at Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh, copier companies are cutting back on their sales, marketing, service, and R&D capabilities. As an example, Xerox builds very little product today...most of the lower speed MFPs are manufactured by Samsung; the higher-end devices made in conjunction with Fuji or other manufacturers.
From our perspective, the impact of the above consolidation will not be dramatic to our customers or our company. It should also be noted that LaserNetworks has completed two acquisitions over the past 24 months. These were service-focused and geographic acquisitions, made to create more capability and value for us customers across North America.
Regarding the copier acquisitions, my belief is that until the copier companies create a business model that first addresses the customer, instead of a model focused on selling more hardware, we'll see continued profit erosion from these companies, and therefore continued consolidation in the copier industry.