More financial woes for Oce’. The Dutch Central Bank has approved plan for Oce’s Pension Fund. Details:
- The fund ratio had dropped to 79.4%
- The Dutch Central Bank had requested that Oce’ submit a recovery plan
- Oce’ will now make a further annual contribution to the fund of 7.5 million euros
- Fund ratio now is 83.9% (goal is 100%)
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Lexmark marked the 15th anniversary of the launch of its first inkjet printer, the Lexmark ExecJet 4076 IIc:
- Original design made by IBM, which sold off its printer and typewriter division in 1991, which became Lexmark
- Just under 100 people were involved in the project
- Project was led by Vic Hair, who is not Lexmark’s VP of R&D
- Many thought that inkjet would be a failure and not replace dot matrix printers
- Original prototype design was a failure as the ink spray in the printer caused a rubber belt inside to disintegrate
- Company is still selling cartridges for the original model
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A recent survey conducted by a lead research firm revealed the following about choices companies make when acquiring desktop printers:
- 71.9% of the b/w printers installed are HP
- 55.6% of the color printers installed are HP
- 42.3% of all printers installed are color
- 64.9% of output from a color printer is in color
- 5.7% of all color devices have software installed to restrict color
- 16.7% of color printers sold are purchased from a copier dealer
- 38 months is average age of printer
- 71.2% of printers are connected to the network
- 71.6% prefer to print to their printer instead of a shared MFP
- 38.6% have a printer on their desktop
- 57.5% make additional copies using their personal printer rather than MFP/copier
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In 1975, Xerox engineer, George Pake, told Business Week magazine that offices in the year 2000 would have desks that have built-in TV-sized display terminals with keyboards that will call up reams of documents, files, mail and messages, thus eliminating the need for printers and copiers.
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InfoTrends released a study on why so few Japanese print shops have invested digital production color systems. Apparently, Japanese printshop owners have not adopted web-to-print software or variable data, as they feel they would rather maintain face to face selling with their customers. In addition, most feel that offset print quality is still superior.
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Offset press maker, Heidelberg of Germany, announced its last quarter’s financials:
- Unit sales down 52%
- Revenue down 22%
- Reported a loss of 63 million euros
- Will lay off an additional 2,500 employees (on top of 2500 already let go)
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Xerox again lost a court battle in Wisconsin. Details:
- Xerox originally was charged by the State of Wisconsin for failing to pay property tax on equipment leased to City of La Crosse and City of Milwaukee, and levied a multimillion fine
- Xerox took their argument to court, and lost the decision.
- Dissatisfied with the decision, Xerox took the case to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, which on 7/30/09,again ruled against Xerox.
Don’t forget to talk to “for profit” businesses about using the IRS Section 179 deduction to get new office equipment this year. In 2009, the deduction is a maximum of $250,000. In 2010 it is only $125,000. In 2011, it is only $25,000.
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Kodak launched Prinergy PDF File Editor Software, allowing graphic artists to use power of Adobe Photoshop and/or Adobe Illustrator to modify PDF files to improve their quality for production printing.
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