Weekend MFP Industry Notes Newsletter
7-5-09
Toshiba announced that it is working with a small town in Alaska to build a nuclear plant. Details:
- Will supposedly be built in town of Galena, population of 580
- Reactor design called “4S” for super-safe, small and simple
- Will produce 10 megawatts of electricity for 30 years without refueling
- Will be cooled by liquid sodium metal
Oce’ reported the results of last quarter financials:
- revenues declined by 4.1% to 676 million euros
- Digital Document Systems reported revenue decline of 7.4%
- Wide Format division revenue declined by 17.2%
- facilities management division revenue increased by 8%
- non-recurring revenue declined by 11.9%
- incurred 3.4 million euro in restructuring costs
- gross margin declined from 40.2% to 35.5%
- Rokus van Iperen, chairman, stated; “Normalized operating income over the second quarter of 2009 was disappointing due to even more challenging market conditions than in the first quarter.”
- color revenue up to 30% of total
- announced it will cut another 300 employees to boost profit
- will cut the working hours of 2,400 employees at its Venlo facility
- booked a loss of 14 million euros
- according to Reuters; “Oce’ said its search for a strategic partnership was going more
slowly than expected”
- factory in Poing, Germany was operating at half of its capacity
- production at its Venlo plant is down 20%
Oce’ announced that it has promoted John Reilly to President of its Document Printing Systems division. Prior to joining Oce’, John was in charge of marketing for Minolta Corp.
Ricoh’s factory direct branches, Ricoh Business Solutions, in an effort to promote sales of its workgroup color laser MFPs, is apparently now offering to pay the first two payments of a customer’s lease of selected models.
Ricoh is also promoting its “@Remote” appliance, which gathers meters from its MFPs, to report to Ricoh service department, among other features. The Ricoh branches in some cases will sell these devices to customers for $1.00, if they agree to allow it to monitor at least 5 devices on the network.
Ricoh announced that it plans on providing a beta version of “Quanp” to user in U.S., after launching in Japan only. The new website offers:
- could storage service
- name is short for quantum paper
- billed as a new visual online storage service
- allows end user an online sport for collecting and organizing photos
- uses a Windows client with a 3d interface
IKON, a division of Ricoh, is now shipping the embedded version of EFI DocSend. Details:
- The original DocSend, also known as EFI SendMe, was an external device, much like
the eCopy ScanStation
- IKON was selling $10 to $20 million of external DocSend’s per year
- IKON claims it sold 100 each of the DocSends connected to the relabeled Konica Minolta production print systems (which it no longer carries after the acquisition by Ricoh)
- Works currently only with Ricoh MFPs that have ESO (Java-based Embedded Software Architecture)
- Actual OCR function performed on the DocSend software loaded on customer’s server
- Scan to e-mail and scan to folder come standard
- Does not come with Scan to Me (that comes with external version)
- Is not currently compatible with the 80 application connectors that are available for external version
- Connectors that are available are EMC Documentum, EFI Digital StoreFront, Open Text Captaris RightFax, Alchemy & Westbrook Fortis for $1080 each
- Later this year, it will launch connectors for Microsoft SharePoint and Ricoh Document Mall
- LDAP and Windows authentication are supported
- File formats supported are searchable PDF, Word and Excel
- Thumbnails displayed on copier control panel
- Image despeckle and deskew are standard
- OCR engine used is Nuance OmniPage
- Base MSRP of $1710 for service license for one MFP
- $1440 for an additional MFP
- $6750 for 5 MFPs
- $12,150 for ten MFPs
- $18,000 for 20 MFPs
New data from a study conduced by IDC:
- 90% of companies do not track how much they spend on producing and maintaining
documents each year
- Companies spend as much as 10% of revenues on document production, management and distribution
- Paper output volumes are increasing by up to 21% per year
- Up to 50% of all company IT department help desk calls are printer related
- 161 billion gigabytes of information exist worldwide
- information will increase to 988 billion gigabytes in next 4 years
- unstructured data is growing at a rate of 65%
- employees spend up to 40% of their workday looking for content
The National Healthcare Anti-Fraud Assocation states reasons to move to electronic medical records:
- Up to 3% of annual healthcare spending ($68 billion in 2007) is lost due to fraud
- 5% to 15% of a hospital’s medical records are duplicated
- Cost to correct medical record from $20 to $100 per duplicate
- 50% to 90% of insurance claim denials could be prevented by securing accurate patient info
- One out of five claims submitted is delayed or denied
- 96% of insurance claims must by resubmitted at lease once
- 9 million adults in U.S. believe that they or a family member have lost confidential medical info
- The average password related help desk call costs $25
- As much as 40% of patient info is missing when need by medical professional
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a court case that alleges Xerox illegally cut the benefits to some of its retirees.
Canon announced it will layoff 700 employees from a plant in Japan that makes stepper motors.
Synnex, a computer distributor that also offers a managed print services program for resellers named PrintSolv, reported that its second quarter earnings beat early estimates. It believes further growth will come from customers in the healthcare industry. Synnex is a large distributor for Hewlett Packard. Synnex’s last quarter revenue was $1.9 billion.
Hewlett Packard in conjunction with Dubai police, confiscated a large amount of fake toner cartridges in a 600 square meter, two story, warehouse in Dubai.
Hewlett Packard sold its Vancouver facility to SEH America for $55 million. Details:
- consists of 4 buildings, 694,000 square feet of space, on 174 acres of land
- was site of launch of HP’s first inkjet printer 30 years ago
- was also headquarters of the Edgeline development
- at one time, there were 3,500 HP employees at the site
- inkjet production now in Malaysia
- SEH makes semiconductors and silicon
The U.S. Government has blocked Sharp from importing some LCD TV’s that infringe on Samsung patents.
Sharp now shipping several new b/w laser MFPs, the MX-363, MX-M453 and MX-M503:
- 36, 45 & 50ppm
- All are A3 models, offering up to 11”x17”
- Will replace the MX-M350 and M450 models
- Code-named “Jupiter III” design
- Base MSRPs range from $7990 to $9990 for M363
- Base MSRPs range from $9390 to $11,390 for M453
- Base MSRPs range from $11,990 to $13,990 for M503
- Black toner yield of 40,000 pages based on 5% coverage per page
- Drum and developer yield of 200,000 pages
- Outside of MFP has textured plastic and chrome accents
- 8.5” color touch screen LCD on “N” version models
- Optional retractable QWERTY keyboard
- “U” versions have b/w touch screen and no keyboard
- “U” models have 100 sheet document feeder that operates at 50opm
- “N” models have 150 sheet document feeder that scans both side of original at same time, up to 70opm
- Comes standard with two 500 sheet paper drawers and 100 sheet stack bypass
- Auto duplex standard
- $845 to add another 500 sheet drawer
- $1075 to add two 500 sheet drawers
- $196 for copy desk
- $1495 for side-mount 3,500 sheet paper deck
- $1295 for fax board
- Built-in print controller on “N” versions:
- 800MHz processor
- 320MB RAM standard (can upgrade to 1GB for $500)
- 80GB hard drive
- 10/100/1000BaseT & USB ports
- PCL print driver standard
- $745 for PostScript print driver
- $625 for Windows Vista XPS print driver (requires 1GB RAM)
- $399 data security kit
- Scans in b/w and color
- Comes standard with one license of Sharpdesk OCR
- additional licenses are $233 each
- $1795 for internal stapling finisher
- $2895 for bookletmaker, for up to 15 sheet booklets
- $2895 for 4,000 sheet stapling finisher
- Any finisher requires $425 relay unit
- $698 hole punch kit
Kodak announced it will unveil the NexPress SE at the upcoming Print 09 show in Chicago in September. It will be running at 120ppm full color, and will have a built-in densitometer so it can calibrate itself.
Interesting facts about Samsung of Korea:
- founded in 1969
- $108 billion in annual revenue
- $18 billion in annual income
- Employs 150,000
- Spends $5.3 billion in research and development each year
- Has 27,000 researchers on staff
- Has 2,500 PhD’s on staff
- Holds 2,725 patents
Samsung announced that in Asia, it will relabel Toshiba made A3 color & b/w laser MFPs. For example, it will call the Toshiba eSTUDIO 451C the Samsung CLX-7455.
Nuance Communications Inc., maker of popular document management software, such as PaperPort, OmniPage OCR, etc., announced it will pay its CEO, Paul Ricci, a base salary of $525,000 and give him $900,000 in stock. More details:
- Mr. Ricci joined Nuance in 1999, and previously worked for Xerox
- Company based in Burlington, Mass.
- Had $7.1 million in profit last quarter on $229 million in revenue
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