Ricoh Shares Rise After Report Says Profit May Rise to Record
April 19 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Ricoh Co., Japan's second- largest maker of office equipment, rose after a newspaper report said the company expects to post a record annual report this year on increased sales of copiers and printers.
The shares, which fell almost a fifth in the past 12 months, gained as much as 3.4 percent to 1,810 yen as of 9:08 a.m. on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Ricoh may report net income of about 100 billion yen ($930 million) for the year started April 1, an increase of 18 percent from the estimate for the previous year, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported, without saying where it obtained the information. Sales may increase 3 percent to 1.85 trillion yen, the report said.
``The details of the report aren't official, and are based on the Nihon Keizai's speculation,'' said Yuko Miyahara, a spokeswoman for Tokyo-based Ricoh.
Office equipment makers such as Ricoh and Canon Inc. are benefiting as customers switch to digital color printers from older black and white models. In Japan, where the two companies are based, shipments of copiers and other office equipment are predicted to jump about 10 percent to 4.22 million units this year, the Japan Business Machine and Information System Industries Association said in December.
Ricoh will probably report a group net income of about 85 billion yen in the year ended March 31, down 7 percent from a year earlier, Nihon Keizai said. The profit decline, the first in 13 years, was caused by the closure of the company's unprofitable optical-disk drive business, the report said.
Original Post