The pandemic is provoking Ricoh into accelerating a corporate restructure that was planned for two years time. The new company structure will be in place in April next year, in time for the new financial year and two years ahead of the original schedule.
From that date the corportate headquarters will oversee five autonomous business units: Digital Service, Digital Products, Graphic Communications, Industrial Solutions and Futures. The latter will focus on products for ‘solving major social issues’. Sustainability is already a core part of Ricoh’s culture and it has previously spoken of the sustainability benefits of switching textile printing from wasteful and polluting processes that dominate today to print on demand using inkjet.
Digital Services and Digital Products will focus on products for the office and improving communications and workflows, especially in light of the adoption of remote working. During the first half of this financial year products and services to the offices worldwide suffered the greatest impact, falling 57.5%, with the second three months showing an improvement on April to June. The UK is marked out as among the worst hit areas, with sales of MFPs still only at 64% of 2019 levels at the end of September.
Revenues from commercial printing in the first six months were down ¥8.7 billion, 22% lower than in 2019. “There is little customer appetite for investing in hardware,” the company comments. Nevertheless it points to good activity around the new Pro C5300 and the Pro V70000 continuous feed inkjet press.
Industrial printing benefitted from a growth in demand for inkjet heads from China. Ricoh also notes that demand in large format graphics has recovered with strong demand for its own machines and strong demand for personal textile printers.
Under the new structure, Graphic Communications will take responsibility for the large format printers as well as production printing systems, generally described as “high volume, high quality printing equipment and solutions”.
Ricoh Industrial will focus on digitising customers’ manufacturing and logistics functions.
The pandemic has naturally forced the company to reconsider financial forecasts for the year ending on 31 March. Currently, it says these will be down 17% over 2019.
