Seiko Epson — Company History

A Suwa watch-parts works, and taking the parts and materials in-house

In May 1942 Daiwa Kogyo, a limited company, was established at Suwa in Nagano Prefecture for the machining of watch parts. In May 1959 it took over the business of the Suwa plant of Daini Seikosha, part of the Hattori Tokeiten group, renamed itself Suwa Seikosha, and in September of the same year reorganised as a joint-stock company. In December 1961 it established Shinshu Seiki as a subsidiary beneath it, to handle the finishing of watch parts. Yamazaki Hisao (山崎久夫), the former representative director who was in effect the founder, walked the universities of Japan to gather graduates, and is said to have sat down at a university's main gate and waited for the student he was after to appear. It was Yamazaki, too, who after the Second World War urged the engineers of Daini Seikosha returning from their wartime evacuation to remain in Suwa.

Almost none of the parts needed to make a watch could be obtained at the time. In the mainspring era there were not even machine tools built for watchmaking, and when the company developed quartz, neither the C-MOS with its low power consumption, nor the crystal oscillator, nor the stepping motor that ticks off the seconds one by one existed anywhere in the world. Rather than taking the road of making do with the parts and materials that could be had, it decided to suffer through making all of them itself, and from that decision came an integration that ran back up to components and raw materials. By 1980 the proportion of watch parts made in-house had reached almost 100 per cent counted by type. Engineers were recruited 35 per cent from electronics and 35 per cent from mechanical engineering, the remainder divided among physics, chemistry and metals, so that no single speciality came to dominate.

The group had about 1,000 engineers, 600 of them university graduates; from roughly their sixth year with the company they were given a development theme as group leader, and thereafter were expected to study by themselves and solve the problem by themselves. Specialities were deliberately crossed — mechanical engineers placed under a leader who had come from electronics, and the reverse — and the practice settled into a way of raising engineers strong in interdisciplinary and composite fields. Yasukawa Hideaki (安川英昭), then a director, said that whatever speciality one had learnt at school no longer applies five years after joining the company. Nakamura Tsuneya (中村恒也), representative director, said the wish to make watches good enough to beat Switzerland, the kingdom of watchmaking, had been carried since the days of the mainspring.

The Tokyo Olympics printing device and the launch of the EP-101

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Seiko as official supplier developed quartz timepieces and, alongside them, a mini-printer to print the times those timepieces measured. It was the world's first printer for a timing machine, used at the Tokyo Games, and the leading roles in its development were taken by Nakamura Tsuneya and Aizawa Susumu (相澤進). This was the first occasion on which the precision machining technique of packing many functions into the extreme confines of a watch came alive on the side of office equipment, which had nothing to do with watches. In September 1968 Shinshu Seiki began a mini-printer business on the basis of that printing technology. The EP-101, launched in November 1969, was the first product of its kind in the world; because the only output device then available for computers and calculators was the cathode-ray tube, and an expensive one at that, demand spread at once.

The name EPSON was formed by following that EP with SON, meaning son. Aizawa Susumu, later executive vice-president, called the EP-101 the monumental product with which a maker of watch parts began its run towards becoming an information-equipment manufacturer. Development and commercialisation of liquid-crystal displays started at the height of the mini-printer's command of the market, spread to calculators, wristwatches and every kind of game machine, and took the leading share in the world. The semiconductor business began in November 1973 and the crystal-device business in July 1976. A manufacturing company, Tenryu (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., was set up in Singapore in August 1968, and Suwa Overseas Ltd. in Hong Kong in February 1974.

EPSON — a brand established without the SEIKO name

In June 1975 EPSON was adopted as the company brand for the non-watch fields. In April of that year a sales company, Epson America, was established in the United States, and the spectacle-lens business began in the same year. So long as it made parts, the company stayed hidden behind other people's finished products and the maker's name never met the customer's eye. From the moment it commercialised the mini-printer, the record left just after the merger states, it had been the company's wish to deliver products under its own brand to the end user. To raise a separate name without the SEIKO mark meant assembling a sales network of its own, apart from Hattori Tokeiten, which handled the watches.

It was not only the brand that was set apart; the intent behind the selling was also separated from that of the rest of the industry. The development policy was placed on not imitating, and was narrowed onto two targets, the mass market and the young. In December 1978 the computer-printer business began; before that the company had sent out an office computer for accounting firms as the first product under its own brand, taking a 40 per cent share within a year of launch. Aizawa Susumu said that in printers and liquid-crystal displays Epson was Epson to the world, but in computers themselves it was unknown, and that doing the same thing as other companies would be no contest; into a market where general-purpose machines were the norm, he deliberately ranged dedicated machines built for a single use.

The MP-80's world share, and Suwa Seikosha's absorption of Epson

The MP-80 terminal printer for personal computers, launched in 1980, settled the EPSON name. Its developers said they had taken the idea of the component hi-fi system and separated the printer, as a peripheral of the computer, from the main unit to stand as a product on its own. The machine took 60 per cent of the market in Japan and 40 per cent of the world market, and OEM approaches from computer makers at home and abroad followed one after another. By 1980 Shinshu Seiki had established EPSON without using SEIKO, and with that printer had locked up about 70 per cent of the world share. Sales were $211.7M (¥48bn), with 2,000 employees and printer output of 4.5 million units — close to half the $441.1M (¥100bn) of its parent company, Suwa Seikosha.

In 1979 the declared income of the eight companies of the Suwa Seikosha group came to $121.3M (¥28bn) in total. Had the business been carried on as a single company rather than under a divided-company structure, that figure would have placed it 56th in the ranking of declared income. The declared income of the Seiko group as a whole was $237.3M (¥55bn), of which the Hattori Tokeiten group accounted for $45.6M (¥10bn), the Seikosha group for $17M (¥4bn) and the Daini Seikosha group for $53.3M (¥12bn); the Suwa Seikosha group was the largest of them. Watches made up 63 per cent of the group's sales and non-watch products 37 per cent, and Nakamura Tsuneya, representative director of Suwa Seikosha, read it as only a matter of time before the expanded non-watch fields reached 50 per cent.

In November 1985 Suwa Seikosha absorbed Epson Corporation and changed its trade name to Seiko Epson Corporation — a company with sales of about $1.3B (¥300bn) and some 7,000 employees. Epson's sales had grown from $94.3M (¥28bn) in 1975 to $401.5M (¥100bn) in 1982 and past $631.5M (¥150bn) in the year to 1984, and even at the time there was a view that the merger served to put a brake on a subsidiary that stood out with its own brand and its own sales company. In colour liquid-crystal televisions, the Suwa group and Seiko Instruments & Electronics were selling the same product against each other under the names Televian (テレビアン) and My Channel (マイチャンネル), and it is said that settling on the new company name took some winding about.

Entering the PC-98 compatible market, and the suit brought by NEC

Epson began work on developing personal computers in 1980. In 1985 it launched an IBM-compatible machine for overseas markets and, with a price lower than its rivals as its weapon, at one point held the fifth-largest share of the American market. Of sales of $661M (¥157bn) in the year to 1984, 65 per cent were exports; narrowed to finished products alone, excluding components, the export ratio reached 80 per cent, and close to 70 per cent of that went to the United States. This growth was supported by a sales network that divided the whole of America into twelve regions, placed in each region one distributor jointly funded with a local operator, and arranged some 2,000 dealers beneath them.

In March 1987 Epson announced the PC-286 models 1, 2 and 3, compatible with NEC's PC-9801 series. NEC applied to the Tokyo District Court for a provisional injunction halting their manufacture and sale, and in April Epson announced that it would stop making and selling the three models, shipping the PC-286 model 0 instead. The two companies settled in November of the same year. The model 0 was priced at $2,469 (¥357,000), while NEC products of much the same capability ran from $2,752 (¥398,000) to $2,994 (¥433,000) — more than $346 (¥50,000) cheaper. In December of that year it launched the laptop PC-286L ahead of NEC. The PC-286 NOTE EXECUTIVE, released in June 1989, was A4-sized, 35 millimetres thick and weighed 2.2 kilograms, at $3,319 (¥458,000); portable computers of the day mostly weighed around 9 kilograms.

A compatible machine cannot survive unless it leads the original on either price or function. Epson's compatibles rose to 60,000 units in the first year of sale and 120,000 in the next, but thereafter fell away to 30,000 and 90,000. Over the same period NEC kept up growth of around 40 per cent and in May 1990 passed three million units of cumulative sales. Around 1987, as the MPU carried in personal computers was moving from the Intel 286 to the more capable 386, the very strength of its 286-based machines slowed Epson's transition and built a mountain of stock. Kimura Toshio (木村登志男), who had started up the personal-computer business at the time, admitted that misjudgements of management had piled up and the company had failed to back the winner.

Deciding to eliminate CFCs ahead of the regulators' timetable

At the end of 1988 President Nakamura Tsuneya decided that the company would stop using chlorofluorocarbons by 1993 — a target earlier than the reduction timetable laid down by the Montreal Protocol adopted in 1987. Yields in semiconductors and liquid crystals rest on the certainty of the cleaning, and CFCs, harmless to the body and powerful as solvents, had spread widely through the shop floors that handled precision parts. Consumption in the 1988 financial year was 1,400 tonnes: about 40 per cent in the optical division, which included spectacle lenses, 20 per cent in the display division for such things as LCD panels, and 20 per cent in the precision-parts division for watch components and disc-drive parts. By use, drying after rinsing accounted for 62 per cent and cleaning for 30 per cent.

CFCs were an all-purpose solvent whose cost did not weigh heavily on the price of the product, so until the problem arose no one had even grasped how much the company as a whole was using. An internal survey committee, the CFC-Free Promotion Committee, began work in August 1988, and in December a dedicated body within the production-engineering directorate, the CFC-Free Promotion Centre, was placed at the Chino works in Nagano Prefecture, staffed by a mere six people. Checking with TQC methods whether each cleaning step was needed at all cut 6 per cent; switching post-rinse drying to spin dryers cut 26 per cent; and rigorous containment and recovery cut a further 18 per cent, so that by the end of 1989 monthly consumption, annualised, stood at 700 tonnes, half the peak. The plan was to halve it again from the previous year during the 1990 financial year, bringing it into the 300-tonne range.

Reduction through management of the shop floor had now reached its limit, and what remained were the hard parts: establishing substitute technology, and introducing it at the roughly 200 subcontractors. CFC-free cleaning equipment does nothing directly for a subcontractor's added value or productivity, and once the waste-water treatment plant needed for pure-water cleaning is counted in, the burden is heavy. The promotion centre joined with outside machinery makers to develop the cheapest cleaning machines they could, and chose the road of publishing its own CFC-free technology. President Nakamura said that on a problem of planetary scale, cooperation came before competition, and that the real competition should be conducted in product development. Seiko Epson achieved the elimination of CFCs worldwide in 1993.

Abolishing the divided-company structure and halving the PC organisation

In the year to March 1991 Seiko Epson recorded its first fall in both sales and profit. Parent-company sales were $3.4B (¥457bn), down 3 per cent on the previous year, and recurring profit was $149.4M (¥20bn), down from the record $180.2M (¥26bn) posted in the year to March 1990. Sales of the information-equipment business fell from $1.7B (¥238bn) in the 1989 financial year to $1.4B (¥206bn) in 1990. President Yasukawa Hideaki said years later that having once split the company into separate firms had been a great failure, recalling that differences in ability between the presidents of those companies had divided them into some that performed very well and others that ran loose. The company abolished the divided-company structure entirely in 1990 and returned in 1991 to its former divisional structure.

In January 1991 it created an information-equipment systems directorate binding together the three business directorates of computers, printers and peripherals, and put Dobashi Mitsuhiro (土橋光広), executive vice-president and a career sales man, in charge of it, gathering every decision on the information-equipment business into one pair of hands. In July it abolished as a rule the intermediate posts whose authority was unclear — deputy directorate heads, deputy division heads, section supervisors and the like. The warehouses scattered across 22 sites around Suwa were consolidated into the Hirooka works at Shiojiri in Nagano Prefecture, where $18.6M (¥3bn) was spent on the buildings alone. In June of the same year Yasukawa Hideaki succeeded Nakamura Tsuneya as president. In November Dobashi moved to the presidency of Epson Sales, so that both the making and the selling were in Dobashi's hands.

At the labour negotiations of 11 March 1992 President Yasukawa said that the environment surrounding the company was extremely severe and that, on the present course, a loss of $8.7M (¥1bn) looked likely in the coming year. A loss would be the first since the founding, and the direct cause lay in a fall of nearly 30 per cent in the personal-computer business, its source of earnings, as the business environment worsened at home and abroad. Parent-company sales in the year to March 1992 were $3.7B (¥471bn) and recurring profit $45.8M (¥6bn), less than a third of the previous year's $149.4M (¥20bn). The year before, Yasukawa had issued an order to halve the personal-computer organisation: of the 500 people in the computer systems division covering development and design, 200 were moved to printers and other divisions with better growth prospects, fixing the establishment at 300, and the division's seven departments were merged into three. Domestic personal-computer shipments in the 1991 financial year were about 230,000 units, down 20 per cent on the year, and the personal-computer business was loss-making.

Recovery through the piezo inkjet method

In inkjet printers, Canon uses a method in which a heater fitted at the nozzle outlet heats the ink into a bubble and ejects it. So as not to touch that patent, Epson developed a method in which a piezoelectric element that expands when a voltage is applied puts pressure on the ink and ejects it. Because there is no fear of the ink being altered by heat, the method carries with it the property of making the ink itself easier to improve. Colour products were developed from 1994, and from 1995 they were sold to consumers under the brand name Colorio. At the end of 1995 the domestic share stood level with Canon at a little over 40 per cent, with Hewlett-Packard of the United States following at about 15 per cent. At a time when 300 to 600dpi was the mainstream, Epson was quick to put 720dpi into mid-range machines, and within a few years took the leading share of the domestic market.

The PM-700C, launched at the end of 1996 with the claim that it printed at photographic quality, sold at a rate that Kimura Toshio, executive vice-president, called an unprecedented hit in Epson's history; including its successor models the share reached 55 per cent. From 1997 the domestic printer market was Epson's alone. Results returned with it: parent-company sales in the 1997 financial year were $6.7B (¥815bn), up 30 per cent on the previous period, and recurring profit $424.7M (¥51bn), up 338 per cent, a record. In the year-end selling season of 1999 the contest was over the fineness of the ink droplet, measured in picolitres — one billionth of a millilitre — with Epson and Canon putting out new products at 4 picolitres and Hewlett-Packard Japan at 5.

President Yasukawa told his managerial ranks that without profit there could be neither ample research nor sufficient investment, and recalled that at first he was called a miser. Division heads were moved as a rule every five years regardless of whether their business was doing well or badly, and how much they had contributed to other divisions was added to their appraisal. In 1993 the company withdrew from the domestic personal-computer business based on NEC-compatible 98 machines, and in November of that year set up Epson Direct, a direct-sales company for IBM-compatible personal computers, at Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. From 1995 it moved the personal-computer business to its subsidiary Epson Sales, and withdrew from recording-media businesses such as floppy-disk drives and hard-disk drives. At the end of 1997 it changed the sequence of finishing a product through planning, then design and development, then manufacture, moving instead to a business-centre structure that bound planning, design and development and sales together and divided them by target market, office or consumer and so on. At the end of March 1998 it launched the LP-8000C colour laser printer at $4,569 (¥598,000).

Leaning on devices for mobile phones, and the bursting of the IT bubble

Into the 1990s the uses of small LCD panels stopped at pagers and pachinko machines, and in monochrome large panels for notebook computers the company ran a heavy loss in 1993. Then appeared the new mobile-phone makers such as Nokia and Ericsson, and in 1994 Epson merged its several liquid-crystal divisions and trained the aim of its development on products for mobile phones. Thereafter more than half of its capital expenditure, some $1.8B (¥200bn) in total, was turned into the field. Driver ICs were developed to match its own LCD panels, and once overseas makers adopted them, other companies' LCD panels came instead to be matched to Epson's driver ICs. Sales of the device business in the 1999 financial year were expected to approach $2.0B (¥230bn), up about 30 per cent on the previous year, and the company took the leading share in the world in four products: STN LCD panels for mobile phones, driver ICs for those panels, crystal oscillators for time display, and high-temperature polysilicon LCD panels for projectors.

Parent-company sales in the year to March 1999 were $7.2B (¥825bn), consolidated sales about $9.2B (¥1.05tn), and parent-company recurring profit $459.4M (¥52bn) — a company the size of Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries by sales and of Kyocera by profit, still not publicly listed. Overseas production and sales exceeded 70 per cent of consolidated sales, and using inkjet printers as its lever the company kept up capital expenditure of more than $878.4M (¥100bn) a year. A listing on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2001 was thought likely, with a market capitalisation said to exceed $8.8B (¥1tn). In April 2001 Kusama Saburo (草間三郎) became president and Yasukawa Hideaki withdrew to the chairmanship. With the bursting of the IT bubble, demand for mobile phones lost speed abruptly, and the electronic-device division's sales fell 23 per cent in the 2001 financial year. Large numbers of defective units were found among the LCD panels delivered to Nokia for mobile phones, and President Kusama flew to Finland at once. The listing planned for the autumn of that year was postponed as market conditions worsened, and in the year to March 2002 the consolidated result sank to a net loss of $146.9M (¥18bn) against a recurring profit of $154.1M (¥19bn).

President Kusama explained which businesses to keep in terms of the ranking of purchasing. Large companies buy from at least three suppliers, and American companies commonly from five; when growth brakes they cut the five to three, so a supplier standing first or second loses little volume, while the fourth and fifth are cut out entirely and fall to zero. In low-temperature polysilicon LCDs the company had gone first and was drawing patent royalties from Sony and Sanyo Electric, but he refused to sanction further work on the ground that the gap with the companies that had caught up had closed. In October 2002 it closed Epson Hatogaya, the main production plant for LCD peripheral ICs bought in 2000 from Texas Instruments of the United States. In the 2001 financial year Sharp, which put its own LCDs into its own finished products, had fallen further than Epson, down 27 per cent across electronic devices as a whole; but in the first half of the 2002 financial year Sharp secured an 18 per cent rise in sales while Epson's fell 13 per cent, and across the whole company Epson posted a parent-company recurring loss of $23.1M (¥3bn).

Listing on the first section, and the devices it could not cut

In January 2003 President Kusama announced internally the first medium-term management plan of his tenure, SE07. He called it a 180-degree turn in device strategy: from now on the company would make products faithful to its core technologies, and would not run parachute-drop businesses. The electronic-device business was placed instead in the role of producing the company's own finished goods — printers of every kind, video projectors, projection televisions — and raising their competitiveness in the market, and anything that would not become a core device was made a candidate for reduction or exit. On 24 June of that year Seiko Epson listed its shares on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The opening price of ¥3,690 was far above the offer price of ¥2,600. Of the 150 institutional investors at home and abroad whom the lead underwriters visited over three weeks, virtually all took part.

The listing had been in view since 1991, when Yasukawa Hideaki became president. The matter had first been raised in 1987, but in that year Hattori Kentaro (服部謙太郎), head of the group, and Hattori Ichiro (服部一郎), president of Epson, died one after the other, and the plan lapsed. The operating margin at the time of listing was 3.7 per cent for the 2002 financial year. Against the 16 per cent that Canon, its rival in printers, put up in the first quarter of the 2003 financial year, President Kusama said the present state was a recovery of no more than 60 per cent of the best years, and set out to reach an operating margin of 7 to 10 per cent in the 2007 financial year and to return to the $966.2M (¥104bn) operating profit of the 2000 financial year. In 2004 Epson combined its own small and medium LCD division with Sanyo Electric, which was strong in low-temperature polysilicon TFT LCDs and in panels for digital cameras, widening the business to about $3.3B (¥360bn). In April 2005 Hanaoka Seiji (花岡清二) became president and Kusama Saburo moved to the chairmanship.

In 2005 and 2006, immediately after the combination, small and medium LCDs were struck by price falls of more than 20 per cent a year. Eighty per cent of Epson's small and medium LCDs went into mobile phones, unit prices fell about 30 per cent in a year, the high-priced products it had counted on sold below expectations, and plant utilisation dropped. In the year to March 2006 the company issued four downward revisions to its forecast within twelve months, and the operating margin, held around 5 per cent in recent years, collapsed to 1.7 per cent. Restructuring losses of about $387M (¥45bn), centred on the semiconductor business, brought a net loss of $153.9M (¥18bn). President Hanaoka said that four downward revisions in a single year were purely and simply a want of virtue on his own part. In March 2006 Kimura Toshio, executive vice-president, who had presided over the whole of finance, resigned along with others, and in June 2008 Usui Minoru (碓井稔) became president.

A ¥111.3bn loss and the concentration of resources on printing

In the year to March 2009 sales fell from $13.0B (¥1.35tn) in the previous period to $12.0B (¥1.12tn), the operating result was a loss of $17.1M (¥2bn), and the net loss reached $1.2B (¥111bn). Employees fell from 88,925 to 72,326. Epson Imaging Devices, which carried the small and medium LCDs, had changed in December 2006 from a joint venture with Sanyo Electric into a wholly owned subsidiary, and its roughly 200 people scattered across the country had been gathered at Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. In April 2010 Seiko Epson transferred part of the assets of the small and medium LCD display business. From setting out the criterion in January 2003, letting go of small and medium LCDs took more than seven years. The crystal-device business too was split off in October 2005 as Epson Toyocom, with its sales function returned to the parent company in April 2012. The year to March 2010 also carried a net loss of $224.5M (¥20bn).

In the 2011 financial year the earthquake and the strong yen forced three downward revisions to the forecast. President Usui declared that in the mature domestic market the company would move in earnest into office printers, and in emerging markets would put in distinctive products such as high-capacity ink models, aiming at sales of $9.4B (¥1tn) in the 2014 financial year; the expectation at the time was $11.0B (¥880bn). In February 2013 the spectacle-lens business was transferred. President Usui recalled years later that until 2012 the yen had risen almost every year and it had been extremely hard, but that through it the company had pressed on with new print heads and high-capacity ink-tank models, and that those results coming through from the second half of 2012 led to its high profitability.

In the year to March 2014 sales were $9.5B (¥1tn) and operating profit $803.1M (¥85bn); in the year to March 2015, sales were $9.0B (¥1.09tn) and operating profit $1.1B (¥131bn). Epson's printers use their own piezo print heads, which are durable and unlikely to fail even when printing in quantity. President Usui said that the greatest obstacle was the existing shape of the trade — selling the printer cheaply and making the money on ink and toner — and that if everyone moved to high-capacity ink-tank printers with low printing costs, they could widen the market together. It was a judgement that competitors entering was in itself no bad thing. In February 2017 Epson Imaging Devices was absorbed and dissolved, and the small and medium LCD business disappeared from within the company. In the year to March 2023 sales reached $9.5B (¥1.33tn) and operating profit $690.3M (¥97bn).

High-capacity ink tanks and the acquisition of Fiery

Printers carrying a high-capacity ink tank in place of ink cartridges made their market in the emerging countries first and then spread to the developed world. In the 2018 financial year the developed countries passed 10 per cent of units sold, and sales targets were set at 10.2 million units for 2019 and 14.2 million for 2022. President Usui explained that where a conventional inkjet moves the head to lay ink on the paper, a line head sets several heads in a row and passes the paper through them, so that printing speed increases dramatically. Pages printed per minute run at about 24 for the conventional inkjet and about 50 for a laser printer, and the line head makes double the latter possible. Replacing laser printers with inkjets and changing the printing of the office was set as the goal of this period. In March 2016 the company put up a long-range vision, Epson 25, and in April 2022 it moved from the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange to the Prime Market under the exchange's review of its market segments.

In April 2020 Ogawa Yasunori (小川恭範) became president. At the end of January, when his appointment was announced, he had not thought the spread of the new coronavirus would reach so far. Working from home and studying from home lifted unit sales in Europe, America and China, while South-East Asia and South America, which had been growing on high-capacity ink-tank models, became difficult as retail shops closed. For the office, the selling points were that inkjets consume less power than laser printers, print faster, and need maintenance less often. Among industrial robots the company had held the leading position in SCARA robots for many years, but in 2023 it was overtaken by Inovance of China, which attacked with prices below 20,000 yuan, close to half those of the Japanese makers.

On 19 September 2024 Seiko Epson announced that it would acquire Fiery, the American maker of software for printers, for about $557.8M (¥85bn), completing the process in December. It was the largest acquisition in its history. About 70 per cent of sales were accounted for by the printing business, the greater part of that by inkjet printers for homes and offices and the rest by industrial printing. Epson had been growing external sales of its inkjet heads rapidly while software development remained its weak point, and it had been buying Fiery's systems to build into some of its own products. Fiery also sold its systems to Canon and Ricoh, and there was almost no word from Epson about the aim of the acquisition, so that voices among rival companies said they could not see the point of it. Six weeks after the announcement, Epson explained that combining its own print heads with Fiery's technology would let it offer an integrated product covering software and the printing workflow as well as the hardware.