Ricoh - Company History

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Financial history 1959–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1936
Founder Ichimura Kiyoshi
Founding location 東京都千代田区
Core business at founding Manufacture and sale of Riken positive-image sensitized paper
Listed 1949
President & CEO Oyama Akira President & CEO since 2023 (age 65, as of 2026)
Current priority Shift to services · Recurring revenue Becoming an integrator of the workplace
Founding
In February 1936 the sensitized-paper department of Rikagaku Kogyo was separated off and Riken Kankoshi Co. began business, with capital of ¥350,000 and thirty-three employees and its office in Hibiya, Tokyo. It made its name selling Riken positive-image sensitized paper, invented at RIKEN, and Dr Okochi Masatoshi, the head of the konzern, entrusted the whole of the management to Ichimura Kiyoshi, a man who had come to the company from selling life insurance by way of the Kyushu sole agency. In 1938 the company was renamed Riken Optical Industries and moved into cameras, and after the war it grew on conveyor-line volume production. The change of name to Ricoh in 1963 came because the name of the Ricopy copier had overtaken the name of the company itself.
The Decision
Ricoh has kept moving the party it earns from, away from the buyer of a machine and towards the work of the office. Its full entry into the office-equipment market in 1955 with the Ricopy 101 desktop copier was a decision to load its raw material, sensitized paper, onto a machine and reach round into the neighbouring demand for copying. Even after it had written off $2.3M (¥840m) of bad assets in the year to March 1965 and gone to a suspended dividend, it set the copier back at the centre and built a shape in which the money comes from service and consumables rather than from the price of the machine. In 2011 it bought Pentax from Hoya and returned to the camera business it had started in, and took a hand to a portfolio that leaned too far towards corporate customers. In 2022 it acquired PFU and took in scanners, and in 2024 it moved the development and production of multifunction printers to Etria, its joint venture with Toshiba Tec. It has narrowed the range of what it makes for itself and shifted what it sells from the equipment itself to contracts under which it takes charge of the whole IT environment.
Today
Ricoh is part-way through a move from a company that sells multifunction printers to one that takes on the work of the workplace. In the year to March 2026 consolidated revenue was $16.5B (¥2.61tn) and operating profit $573.5M (¥91bn), with Japan accounting for $6.6B (¥1.05tn), four-tenths of the total. Digital Services, which stacks IT services on top of the sale and servicing of multifunction printers, came to $12.6B (¥1.99tn), three-quarters of the whole, yet its operating profit stopped at $176.4M (¥28bn) — below the $199.2M (¥32bn) of Digital Products, which develops and makes the equipment. Facing an activist shareholder holding about a fifth of the company, Ricoh has held to a 50 per cent total-return policy, but its return on equity for the 2025 financial year was 5.1 per cent, short of the more than 9 per cent it had set itself.
Competition
The rivals Ricoh has fought are all firms whose names stood beside its own in copiers. In the 2003 market for information equipment Ricoh was one of a big three alongside Canon and Fuji Photo Film, while Konica and Minolta, outspent on research and development, sought to close the gap by merging. Canon then gave up its go-it-alone principle, bought Oce of the Netherlands and widened into commercial printing, and Fujifilm wound up a joint venture of fifty-six years to make Fuji Xerox a wholly owned subsidiary. Ricoh, on the big-three side of that market, bought the North American distributor IKON in 2008, stumbled over the integration and settled the account ten years later with an impairment. Its attempt to widen by acquisition failed in North America, and what is growing its profit now is IT services in Japan, where it takes on everything from replacing a customer's PCs to their security.

Timeline

1936–1976From sensitized paper and cameras to a copier manufacturer

  1. 1936RIKEN's sensitized-paper department is separated as Riken Kankoshi
  2. 1938Renamed Riken Optical Industries; camera manufacturing begins
  3. 1949Shares listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
  4. 1950The Ricohflex twin-lens reflex camera goes on sale
  5. 1955The Ricopy 101 diazo copier is developed
  6. 1959Ricoh Fax, Japan's first domestically made electronic copier
  7. 1961Listed on the First Section of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges
  8. 1962Ricoh of America established
  9. 1963The company name is changed to Ricoh
  10. 1965Dividend suspended; bad assets written off in a single stroke
  11. 1968Founder Ichimura Kiyoshi dies at sixty-eight
  12. 1971Awarded the Deming Application Prize; Ricoh Nederland established
  13. 1973Ricoh Electronics established

1977–2016From standard-bearer of office automation to a third crisis

  1. 1977Ricoh proposes the OA concept at the Hanover Messe
  2. 1978A merit system open from age thirty-five is introduced
  3. 1980Own-brand exports begin
  4. 1983Hamada Hiroshi becomes president at forty-nine
  5. 1987The Imagio 320, the first digital copier, goes on sale
  6. 1991The CRP restructuring programme is announced
  7. 1994The The Man scheme is created
  8. 1995Savin and Gestetner acquired; Gestetner Holdings follows in September
  9. 1996Sakurai Masamitsu becomes president
  10. 2001Lanier Worldwide acquired
  11. 2004Hitachi Printing Solutions acquired
  12. 2008IKON Office Solutions acquired
  13. 2010Ricoh Japan formed by merging seven domestic sales companies
  14. 2011The Pentax business is bought from Hoya

2017–2023A third reckoning with the past, and redefinition as a digital services company

  1. 2017Yamashita Yoshinori becomes president and launches the Ricoh reboot
  2. 2018Impairment losses of ¥175.9bn on IKON and others taken in one charge
  3. 2018Withdrawal from non-core businesses
  4. 2019Operating profit recovers to ¥86.8bn
  5. 2021A buyback of up to ¥100bn, some 20 per cent of shares, under a 50 per cent total-return policy
  6. 2022PFU acquired from Fujitsu for ¥84bn
  7. 2023Oyama Akira succeeds Yamashita as president
  8. 2024Etria, the joint venture with Toshiba Tec, is established

Founding Story

1936–1976From sensitized paper and cameras to a copier manufacturer

Ricoh did not begin as a start-up but as a division cut loose: in February 1936 the Riken konzern spun off its sensitized-paper department and handed the whole of it to Ichimura Kiyoshi, an outsider who had come from selling life insurance and who had smashed a production machine with a hammer in a quarrel with the old hands. What he built on that footing was not one business but a chain of them — sensitized paper, then cameras, then the desktop copier — each borrowing the technology of the last and each sold hard, a habit of switching applications that would define the company long after his death.

An unusual starting point: separation from the Riken konzern

What the newly separated sensitized-paper department handled was Riken positive-image sensitized paper, invented at RIKEN — the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research — and patented at the time in Japan, Germany, the United States and Canada; the rights to manufacture and sell it were held by Rikagaku Kogyo, the core company of the Riken konzern, which was dissolved in August 1941[1]. Ichimura Kiyoshi (市村清) came from Saga Prefecture, and it was his record as a life-insurance salesman at Fukoku Mutual Life that won him promotion to head of the Riken konzern's sensitized-paper department — an unusual career for a company chief. The long-serving staff resented the outsider brought in over them fiercely, and the conflict escalated to the extreme point where Ichimura himself destroyed a sensitized-paper production machine with a hammer. Okochi Masatoshi (大河内正敏), the head of the Riken konzern, did not discipline him. In February 1936 he separated the sensitized-paper department instead, establishing Riken Kankoshi Co.[2] with capital of ¥350,000 and thirty-three employees[3], taking the chairmanship himself and entrusting the whole of the management to Ichimura[4]. The separation has been handed down ever since as an episode demonstrating Okochi's judgement of men.

Once independent, Ichimura put the sensitized-paper business on a sound footing, and in 1938 renamed the company Riken Optical Industries and moved into camera manufacturing[5]. Under wartime conditions camera production was almost entirely halted and the optical division switched to making binoculars for the military. After the war the company lost its overseas plants, but its main domestic facilities came through the bombing largely unscathed, and sensitized paper grew steadily once controls were lifted[6]. The Ricohflex, launched in 1950, was exported at 10,000 units a month on the Korean War procurement boom, and the company came to be spoken of alongside Sony and Honda as one of the three stars of postwar Japan. The Ricopy 101 desktop copier, launched in 1955, applied the company's sensitized-paper technology and stands as the machine that marked its full entry into the office-equipment market. An industry journal of the day judged that the company was developing through a shift from a camera focus to an all-round office-equipment maker; with Ricopy at the centre, expectations for new products are limitless[7]. Ichimura's style of management — never clinging to one product category, moving resources nimbly into the next growth field — formed the character of the company.

The <q>god of management</q>, complacency, and rebuilding from a suspended dividend

In the first half of the 1960s Ricoh grew under Ichimura Kiyoshi, hailed as the god of management, but the complacency that tends to settle on a successful firm spread through the organisation. In 1962 Jitsugyo no Sekai wrote that Riken Optical's management has various distinguishing features, and one of them is diversification — and it took the lead on the trend of the times, a model case that has succeeded to an exceptional degree[8]. The recession that followed the 1964 Tokyo Olympics worsened the company's position, however, and in the year to March 1965 it wrote off $2.3M (¥840m) of bad assets in a single stroke, suspended its dividend[9] and faced its first serious crisis of the postwar period. Writing on the reconstruction of the watch business the following year, Keizai Tenbo reported that Ichimura Kiyoshi, once celebrated as the very god of management, has at last gone to the banks in tears, asking for a blanket deferral of interest[10]. A rationalisation that seconded 800 of the company's 4,000 staff to affiliated companies mapped out the route back, and set the pattern — written off in one lump — for dealing with the burdens of the past that would recur thereafter.

What turned the rebuilding around was the Electronic Ricopy BS2, an electrostatic copier launched in 1965. Society's demand for office rationalisation and the timing of the product coincided, and the dividend was restored in only two and a half years. Diamond recorded the process by which the copier replaced the camera as the face of the company: the success of Ricopy far surpassed that of the Ricohflex. And so the name of Ricoh became known everywhere[11]. Ichimura died suddenly in 1968 at the age of sixty-eight, but the method he had led — the continuous conversion of the business from sensitized paper to cameras and from cameras to copiers — was engraved into the organisation as a way of working: commercialise an existing technology in a new field of application, and take share with selling power. The market instinct and the sales discipline he had built up in his years as an insurance salesman ran consistently beneath the management of the company, and became the foundation of the Ricoh that sells.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  2. 有価証券報告書 (annual securities report)↩
  3. 有価証券報告書 (annual securities report)↩
  4. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  5. 有価証券報告書 (annual securities report)↩
  6. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  7. 新日本経済 (Shin Nihon Keizai, 1950)↩
  8. 実業の世界 (Jitsugyo no Sekai, Sep 1962)↩
  9. 有価証券報告書 (annual securities report)↩
  10. 経済展望 (Keizai Tenbo, Oct 1967)↩
  11. ダイヤモンド (Diamond, 26 August 1963)↩

References & sources

  1. Jitsugyo no Sekai (Mita Shogyo Kenkyukai), Sep 1962, An excellent company: Riken Optical Industries. NDL Digital Collections.
  2. Keizai Tenbo, 1 Oct 1967, Ichimura Kiyoshi, the "god of management", in tears at the bank.
  3. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Ricoh entry.
  4. Interview with Hamada Hiroshi, then manager of the copier section in Ricoh's head-office sales administration department and later president of Ricoh.

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