From copier maker to digital-services company (2022)

Rebuilding the core by acquisition, not invention

The crux of this decision was to reconfigure Ricoh’s core office business from the outside in. After the $1.6B (¥176bn) impairment of 2018 exposed how far the per-unit hardware model had run, Ricoh declared itself a “digital-services company” and — for the first time — chose to rebuild that core not by developing in-house but by buying and partnering. It took 80% of Fujitsu’s scanner and business-process unit PFU for $639.4M (¥84bn) in September 2022, moving to full ownership in 2025, and in 2024 folded multifunction-printer production and sales into Etria, a joint venture with Toshiba Tec. Germany’s Natif.ai and America’s Cenero were bought to bring software and service capability in from outside.

What makes the pivot hard is precisely what made Ricoh strong. All three of its past crises were escaped by landing the next hit product — the electrostatic copier, the return to core, the sold-off assets — and the organization learned, deeply, that a downturn is something a new machine fixes. A shift to services asks it to unlearn that reflex: to grow contracts rather than unit sales, and to redefine its ninety-year, second-mover knack for commercialization inside a recurring, solution-shaped business as print declines. Whether the founder’s habit of carrying one technology into the next market can be run one more time — from hardware into services — is the open question the next generation of managers inherits.