Company history

Ricoh did not begin as a start-up but as a spin-off. The sensitized-paper division of the Riken concern — built on Riken positive photographic paper, invented at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research and patented in Japan, Germany, the United States and Canada — was hived off in February 1936 into Riken Sensitized Paper, capitalized at ¥350,000 with thirty-three employees. Its head was an unlikely industrialist: Kiyoshi Ichimura, a Saga-born former life-insurance salesman recruited from outside to run the paper business. Veteran staff resented the outsider so fiercely that the feud escalated to Ichimura smashing the paper-coating machinery with a hammer; rather than dismiss him, Riken’s chief, Dr. Masatoshi Okochi, separated the division and handed Ichimura complete control — an episode still told as proof of Okochi’s eye for talent.

Ichimura ran the company the way a salesman would: by carrying one technology into the next market. In 1938 he renamed it Riken Optical and moved into cameras; through the war, camera work all but stopped and the optics line switched to military binoculars. Postwar, with its domestic plant largely spared, the firm rebuilt fast — the Ricoh Flex twin-lens camera (1950) rode the Korean War boom to exports of some ten thousand units a month, ranking Ricoh with Sony and Honda among the celebrated postwar upstarts. Then in 1955 the desktop Ricopy 101 diazo copier — sensitized-paper know-how repurposed for the office — carried Ricoh into the office-equipment market. A contemporary trade journal caught the pattern: growth by turning “from a camera focus into a full-line office-equipment maker.” Refusing to cling to any one product category, and redeploying resources into the next growth field, would define the company’s character.

Under Ichimura — hailed in the press as “the god of management” — Ricoh prospered and diversified widely into the early 1960s, and a complacency common to successful firms set in. The reckoning came with the slump after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics: in the year to March 1965 Ricoh wrote off $2.3M (¥840m) of bad assets in a single stroke, suspended its dividend, and faced its first serious postwar crisis — going so far as to ask its banks to freeze interest. Rationalization followed, seconding 800 of 4,000 staff to affiliates. That habit — clearing the accumulated burden in one lump — would recur at every later crisis.

What turned the recovery was product timing. The 1965 electrostatic copier (the electronic Ricopy BS-2) met a society hungry to mechanize office work, and Ricoh restored its dividend within two and a half years. The copier, not the camera, was now the company’s face — it had already taken the name Ricoh Co., Ltd. in 1963. Ichimura died suddenly in 1968 at sixty-eight, but the method he had drilled in — take an existing technology into a new application, then win share by selling — outlived him. The market instinct and sales discipline of his insurance-salesman years ran on beneath everything as the foundation of what became known as “Ricoh, the sales company.”

In 1977 Ricoh unveiled the world’s first concept of OA — office automation — at the Hannover Messe, dressing the office-equipment maker in an international brand. Its edge, though, was less the technology than the machine that sold it. As Hiroshi Hamada — a copier manager who would later become president — put it, Ricoh’s strength lay “in its original technology and, above all, in a peerless sales network laid down across the whole country”: some 7,000 field salespeople backed by a three-layer structure of a captive dealer (Otsuka Shokai), specialist office-equipment trading houses and stationery wholesalers — a net fine enough to call on small firms door to door.

As the plain-paper-copier market expanded, that net and a recurring-revenue model locked together: the more machines installed, the more the maintenance fees and consumables flowed, year after year. Ordinary profit reached $158.7M (¥22bn) in the year to March 1989 — a subscription-like engine decades before the word. But the very success of selling one machine at a time bred inertia. Diversification into PCs and LAN gear scattered resources; digital copiers arrived early (the 1987 Imagio 320) yet struggled for years; and in the year to March 1992 Ricoh posted its first operating loss since listing, $13.4M (¥2bn). In November 1991 Hamada launched the CRP restructuring — targeting some $275.1M (¥37bn) in cost cuts and demanding resignation letters from twenty-three directors — while a new integrated design-and-production method cut development cost to a quarter and development time in half, and Ricoh declared a return to its core of copiers and fax.

Masamitsu Sakurai, president from 1996, doubled consolidated sales over eleven years to about $17.6B (¥2.07tn), buying his way into overseas distribution — Savin and Gestetner in 1995, Lanier in 2001, Hitachi Printing Solutions in 2004. His thesis was digital convergence: “in the digital age, copiers, printers, fax machines, cameras and PCs connect, and Ricoh saw that early.” The strategy widened the sales footprint that had always been Ricoh’s moat.

But the moat did not travel. In October 2008 Shiro Kondo bought the North American office-equipment distributor IKON for $1.7B (¥171bn) — days before the Lehman shock — and the integration ground. The tacit craft of Ricoh’s three-layer Japanese network could not be transplanted into an acquired foreign one, and the deal set the stage for a huge write-down a decade later. Alongside, Ricoh kept extending its optical heritage, buying HOYA’s Pentax camera business in 2011 — but the office-equipment market was maturing, and per-unit hardware sales were nearing their ceiling.

Yoshinori Yamashita took the presidency in April 2017 under the banner “Resurgent Ricoh,” announcing a wholesale review of five principles the company had treated as bedrock — chasing market share, a full product line, building everything in-house. In the year to March 2018 Ricoh booked $1.6B (¥176bn) of impairment, centred on IKON, and reported an operating loss of ¥115.6bn and a net loss of $1.2B (¥135bn) — the worst results in its eighty-odd-year history. It was the third lump-sum reckoning after 1965 and the 1991 CRP, and the largest of them.

Yamashita sold non-core businesses and steadied the ship — operating profit recovered to ¥86.8bn the next year — following the pattern that all three of Ricoh’s crises had been resolved by a hard reset just after a change of leader. The deeper wager was structural: recasting the company as a “digital-services company” and rebuilding its core office business not through in-house development but through outside deals — taking 80% of Fujitsu’s scanner unit PFU for $639.4M (¥84bn) in 2022 (moving to full ownership in 2025) and forming the joint venture Etria with Toshiba Tec in 2024 to pool office-printing production and sales. Yamashita handed the presidency to Akira Oyama in 2023 to see the shift through. Consolidated sales reached ¥2,348.9bn in the year to March 2024, but the real test is whether a company that grew for ninety years selling one machine at a time can redefine its second-mover knack for commercialization inside the recurring, solution-shaped business that print’s decline now demands.