Company Quarterly Results
Canon reported its last quarter’s financials:
- 56% drop in net profit
- Total revenue dropped 22%
- Office equipment division income dropped 45.5%
- Office equipment sales account for 60% of revenue, and 80% of profit
- Digital camera sales account for 30% of revenue
- Digital camera unit sales down 14% (predicts it will grown 10% in 2010)
- 7th straight quarterly profit drop
Toshiba released its last quarter’s financials:
- Net loss of $2.2 million
- Sales fell 14%
- Will cut fixed costs by 10% on top of existing plan to cut 300 billion yen
- Will cut 3900 employees
- Will reduce research & development costs by 15%
- Will cut spending on equipment and factories by 59%
Lexmark released its last quarter’s financials:
- total revenue down 15% over last year but up 6% over last quarter
- supplies revenue up 4% over last quarter, but down 12% over last year
- hardware revenue up 13% over last quarter, but down 24% compared to last year
- hardware units shipments up 4%
- laser unit sales down 22%
- inkjet unit sales down 38%
- operating income down 54%
- net income down 73%
- will cut another 825 employees
EFI announced details on its last quarter’s financials:
- revenues of $100.9 million, down 30%
- net loss of $12.2 million
- net income of $1.2 million
- 22% growth in inkjet business
- Fiery revenue down 38% to $42 million
- Gross margin was down 57%
Sharp reported its latest financials:
- net loss of $196 million for first half of fiscal year
- operating profit fell 96.9%
- total revenue fell 17.5%
- copier sales revenue down 19.2%
Kodak reported its last quarter’s financials:
- revenue fell 26%
- net loss of $111 million
- revenue in production print fell 18%
Ricoh reported that during the last quarter, its net profit declined 89.5%
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- Hewlett Packard loses one of its largest distributors in Australia, Phoenix Toner. The general manager, Don Bentley, stated; “The business didn’t want to have that amount of cash tied up in something that was not profitable”, referencing the HP printer supplies that it sold. The company will now concentrate on other brands.
- Hewlett Packard has filed an injunction with the U.S. International Trade Commission in an attempt to bar Asian companies from importing print cartridges into the U.S. that violate HP’s patents and work with HP printers. The companies involved include Ninestar Technology of China, InkTec of South Korea and Acer of Taipei.
- Hewlett Packard announced a partnership with the University of Michigan to sell physical copies of over 500,000 rare books, while making digital versions available online for free. HP’s BookPrep service will take in raw scans of books, clean them up, and then offer print-on-demand copies for sale.
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A study conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that two out of three Americans prefer print media to email ads:
- 58% believe that the paperless office will never happen
- 64% prefer reading print on paper versus computer screen
- 67% would rather save money than save the environment
- 11% believe their company is now less likely to “be green”
- 26% say their company outsources print jobs at least once per year
- 19% say their company orders print over the Internet
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University researchers trying to find way to remove toner from paper. Thomas Counsell & Julian Allwood of the University of Cambridge, claim that when they expose a printed image to 60% demethylsulphoxide and 40% chloroform, followed by ultrasound, toner is removed, and paper is reusable.
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IDC announced that the enterprise publishing market (transpromo VDP production print) grew 8.3% in 2008, and “will continue to post strong growth over the next 5 years”.
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BEI, a company that tracks service data for copier dealers and market service management software, announced it has hired former Global/Xerox executive, Steve Rolla. Previous to Global, he was an executive with IKON.
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EFI, in an effort to boost value of its stock, announced it will buy back $70 million worth of its shares
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More info on Xerox/ACS merger. According to paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, if the acquisition failed to go through, Xerox would have to pay a breakup fee of $323 million, and ACS would have to pay $194 million. To help pay for the $6.4 billion purchase, Xerox received a commitment for up to $3 billion from JPMorgan Chase in part to refinance ACS’s $1.8 billion in debt. Both companies are now fighting numerous lawsuits that have been filed to prevent the deal from happening.
Also benefiting from the Xerox/ACS deal are the banks involved:
- Citigroup, which advised ACS, will take home $32.5 million
- Evercore, which advised ACS, gets $16 million
- Blackstone Group, which advised Xerox, gets $20 million
- JPMorgan Chase, which advised Xerox, gets $20 million
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In a speech at the Rockerfeller Center in New York last week, former Xerox CEO, Anne Mulcahy, stated that while at Xerox, the three planks she identified to turn around the company were to make Xerox:
- environmentally conscious
- services led
- technology enabled
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Xerox scientists in Norwalk, CT, announced they have invented a way to imprint electronic circuits on materials, such as plastic and fabric. In theory, this technology could pave way for products like:
- Smart pill boxes that track how much medication a patient has taken
- Display screens tha troll up to fit into a briefcase
- Clothing that monitors body temperature or heart rate
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Xerox launched its new Enterprise Print Services initiative, including:
- Supports employees of its customer who use remote or home use printers, via phone, email or Web
- New universal print driver for remote employees to access printers when working in corp. offices
- Print routing based on analysis of employees work habits
- Setup up guidelines to direct documents to most appropriate device
- Allow print requests to be sent to internal provider via web interface
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The Meridian Public School District, of Idaho, will restart its copier bid in November. This is after is was forced to cancel the award it gave to Xerox, after local dealer, Fisher’s Document Systems, filed a complaint. The school board hopes to give out a new award in January, 2010.
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Another obscure company acquires patents and sues for licensing fees. St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, of Michigan, is now suing Apple Computer as it claims the company is violating patents it owns regarding digital camera technology. The company already has won the following lawsuits:
- $25 million from Sony Corp.
- $34.7 million from Canon
- $3 million from Fuji
- Other deals were struck with HP, Kodak, Verizon, Motorola & Sanyo
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Red Bend Software Inc. of Israel, is suing Google for patent infringement, claiming that the company violated a patented algorithm in Google Chrome Web browser.
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A managed print services company gets purchased. MyPrint Corp. of Irvine, CA, announced that a majority interest in the company was purchased by Triton Pacific Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Los Angeles. MyPrint’s president, Jeff Carlson, stated; “We are all excited about the opportunities to work closely with the Triton Pacific team in growing MyPrint to the next level”
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Sanyo, which is about to become a part of Panasonic, announced it sold its battery plants to Fujitsu for $71 million.
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Oce’ announced that the president of its Production Printing Systems division, Mel Babolyian, was named to the board of directors of NPES, the association for suppliers of printing, publishing, and converting technologies
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Konica Minolta is partnering with companies in Russia to develop nanotechnology. The partnership with Sun Innovations and RUSNANO Corp, will apparently use industrial inkjet printers to make special coatings for solar panels.
The Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization (JIDPO), has given Konica Minolta four “Good Design” awards for the bizhub C220, C280, C360, C452, C552, C652, PRO 1051 and PRO 1200.
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The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA), which tracks lending practices, stated that equipment leasing revenue fell 30.9% in September from the same month in the previous year to $4.7 billion. This is because of increase in delinquencies
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Image Print & Sign Ltd. of New Zealand was fined by local government for illegally making copies of copyrighted books.
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PrintFleet is partnering with De Lage Landen in Europe to help copier dealers sell managed print services with a cpc lease program.
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In a survey of independent copier dealer service managers, Office Products Analysts found:
- average scanned pages per month on a scan-enabled MFP is 3,000 pages per month
- favorite brand based on reliability was Kyocera
- 54% admitted that they use Non factory original parts when they fix their copiers in the field
- 52% admitted that they provide their customers with Non factory original toner
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Toshiba announced it is now reselling new solution software from Prism:
- deskRecord
- deskSystem
- deskForm
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A Chicago area man faces up to 20 years in prison for falsely claiming he was reselling high speed production print systems. Matthew Scott, owner of Gelsco Inc. of Northlake, Illinois, started as a printer repair company. However, in last 9 years Mr. Scott supposedly bilked 60 investors out of $28 million, claiming he was buying printers worth more than $100,000, and was able to resell them in under 90 days for 20% profit.
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Kofax, maker of document management software, announced that when businesses acquire a Fujitsu business scanner, they can get 50% off on Kofax Express software.
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MyFax Inc. announced that end users can download a free program that will allow anyone to fax from an application, using Internet Fax. The free software, MyFax Print-to-Fax Assistant, allows end users to Internet fax, by choosing Print from their application. End users must have an Interfax service, which MyFax can provide for a monthly subscription fee.
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A printshop fires one of its largest customers. R.R. Donnelley announced that it would incur charges of $130 million to terminate a contract it had with one of its customers. The early out would allow the company to “end their contractual relationship allowing Donnelley to exit from certain unprofitable operations.” The customer was not named.
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