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Ricoh is going down
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Ricoh is facing its biggest crisis ever. So President and CEO Yoshinori Yamashita has decided to "Break with Past Management," as his slogan says. "People around me warn that our survival will then be questioned."

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    Ricoh is staring at huge losses as the market for multifunctional printers, Ricoh’s cash cow, evaporates and its global sales network racks up high costs.

    As the dormant business winds show no sign of picking up anytime soon, Yamashita has adopted a cost reduction target of 100 billion yen ($912 million) for the three years through March 2020. The medium-term business plan includes cutting back-office employees in North America and reviewing Ricoh's sales network there.

    Today, Ricoh cannot improve earnings without drastically cutting costs at its sales force, but the division holds an awful lot of sway inside the company. Even Yamashita -- who, remember, is calling for a clean break from the past -- is approaching the task with caution. Job cuts, he said, will come through "attrition" -- mandatory retirement and workers leaving of their own volition.

    http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/For-Ricoh-it-s-a-sink-or-swim-moment

    Need more profits. As soon as profits become low capitalists forgets about "the spirit of three loves" and throw you away.

  • 6 Replies sorted by
  • 4CardsMan4CardsMan

    Back in the day, I was a Ricoh copier technician, but then they worked through local dealers. All the Ricoh dealers were bought and consolidated before Ricoh stepped in and bought the whole thing. Ricoh was the company that dislodged Xerox as the market leader with a more reliable product. Perhaps they should have stuck to manufacturing.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Ricoh was the company that dislodged Xerox as the market leader with a more reliable product. Perhaps they should have stuck to manufacturing

    They could not, as actions they did were unavoidable in the run for higher profits and lower running costs.

  • 4CardsMan4CardsMan

    @Vitaliy_Kiselev - their actions were quite avoidable. They had a good thing going and changed their business model to completely knock off Xerox. Big mistake. A great woman brought Xerox back from the dead. You are partially correct that the dynamic of capitalism suggests consolidation. The fatal step was buying up all the dealers and creating a corporate structure. If they had kept the dealers, they would be in much better shape.

    To give you an example of what happened, a top technician at a local branch (formerly a dealer) was caught with porn on his hard drive at work and was promptly fired. Before the dealer was bought out, everyone would have laughed and he would have bought everyone a beer after work. The technician wound up at Home Depot at half the pay, and the company lost someone that was replaced only at great cost. It is that corporate structure that is so deadly. One thing that I like about the camera and computer business is that the manufacturers work through dealers, even Apple. So, the federal structure that has worked fairly well, until now, in government, also works best in business. As much as I do not like car dealers, we would be much worse off if we had to deal with GM, Ford, and Toyota through a corporate structure.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    their actions were quite avoidable.

    In the long run - no. Sooner or later management will go same way trying to unify and cut costs. Same things happened in communication providers and other areas. They fired many experienced people, but they do not see big problems with it. As main goal is to rise profits and do it asap.

    To give you an example of what happened, a top technician at a local branch (formerly a dealer) was caught with porn on his hard drive at work and was promptly fired.

    Btw, the better technician is the more porn he watches :-) Btw all this bullshit about how porn is bad is somehow come from mouths of shits who 24/7 show you bodies in each and every news (and who also stand behind many of this deaths).

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    PG Porn to the rescue:

    http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvl1pz_pg-porn-nailing-your-wife-with-nathan-fillion-aria-giovanni-video_fun

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Recent report

    Decrease in income and profit in the camera business due to the decrease in amounts of sales of digital cameras

    http://www.ricoh.com/IR/financial_data/financial_result/data/30/q1_report.pdf

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