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What just happened? The US is not the only country feeling the effects of the tech contraction. The ailing print industry is losing another of its historical, leading players. Ricoh, a Japanese company founded in 1936, has announced a massive restructuring effort with a significant cut to its headcount.
Ricoh will soon start restructuring plans that include laying off around 2,000 employees from its global workforce, scaling down the office device business, and focusing on assisting third-party companies with digital transition processes. The job reduction announced by the Tokyo-based firm will affect around three percent of the 79,544 people employed as of March 2024.
Nikkei Asia broke the news, noting that Ricoh is in a very tight spot. The market for printers and other office machines is shrinking, while enterprise customers are finally adapting to a fully digital business model. The recent remote and hybrid work experiments during the pandemic delivered a seemingly finishing blow to the printing industry, and printer manufacturers are now scrambling to deal with the consequences.
Ricoh's job cuts will run until the end of its current fiscal year in March 2025. The company will offer around 1,000 Japanese workers an early retirement plan. The one-time cost for the entire restructuring effort amounts to 16 billion yen ($112 million). It expects the staff reduction to boost annual profits by 9 billion yen over the next fiscal year. Ricoh isn't leaving the printing industry, though.
In July, the company announced a joint venture with Toshiba Tec Corporation to create a new entity called Etria. Ricoh transferred around 8,400 employees to the new firm, which will develop and manufacture new office printers. Etria will remain unaffected by Ricoh's latest job cuts.
The Japanese corporation wants to refocus its business on digital market transformation, offering digitization support for essential office operations like data management for invoices and bills of delivery. Ricoh is also toying with AI since data analysis, and other advanced algorithmic technologies are the way to go for a bountiful and paperless future.
The pandemic gave the printer industry a temporary elation period, as people found themselves printing more paper documents than before. However, as HP CEO Enrique Lores recently highlighted, printed page levels have dwindled lower than before the Covid lockdowns.