Ricoh’s graphic communications business bounced back in 2021/22 financial year, but could not quite achieve a profit at the operating level. The business reported a 17% uplift in sales to ¥187.1 billion £1.15 billion in commercial print, equivalent to 8.8% of overall sales. But it could not quite overturn a ¥47.4 million loss in 2020, turning in an operating loss of ¥0.4 million. The 2021 sales figure was higher than achieved in 2019 by what was then the commercial print operation.
However, its is not all plain sailing for Ricoh as a group. CEO Jake Yamashita points to upheavals afflicting the business since the end of Covid. “We can no longer be certain that the past will predict the future,” he says in the introduction to the company’s 2022 Integrated Report. The shift in working practices sparked by the pandemic and work from home has reduced office printing. Volumes will never return to what they were, he says. And while the company was anticipating a gradual decline in office printing, “the drop has occurred several years earlier than we envisioned”.
Commercial printing has a strong role to play in the digital transition of the workplace Ricoh believes as part of a strategy to focus on edge devices, that is those that capture physical items into digital forms or take the digital items and render them in physical form.
The company says that the return of economic activity in Europe and North America had helped sales in its graphic communications division, though non hardware sales have increased more than hardware sales. There has also been growth in demand for inkjet heads.
Divisional president Sergio Kato says that Ricoh’s focus is on helping customers use digital high value on demand print to expand their business and to reduce carbon footprint “by curtailing mass printing and disposal”.
He goes further: “We will help brand owners expand their businesses by offering marketing communications tools that integrate paper and electronic media.”
The company’s Business Booster programme has touched more than 5,000 customers in printing.
Its related Industrial Solutions division provides marking and coding technology and has been successful with a laser coding application for printing promotional messaging, QR codes and product details on labels at 300m/min. This has been rolled out in Japan on personalised labelling for the Healthya brand of beverages. The technology will enable tracking of products through individual labelling.
