Breaking News: Canon to Buy Flagging Printer Company Oce

In recent months the economic downturn has had an adverse effect on the printing market, at a time when competition between manufacturers has increased. Thirteen months ago Ricoh – the largest copier maker in the world – bought out the U.S. distributor Ikon Office Solutions, to increase Ricoh’s penetration of the American market. Crucially, at the time Ikon had a business deal with Canon to distribute its products: the takeover therefore removed a significant source of Canon’s sales and revenue.


On Tuesday, Canon announced a gesture to combat the downturn and its reduced revenues by merging with Oce, the biggest manufacturer in the European printing market. The merger - worth £658.3 million in shares – is of especial benefit to Oce, having reported losses the last two financial quarters, while making cutbacks in manpower. Chief Executive of Oce, Rokus van Iperen, said the deal makes a ‘global combination’ of the two companies, capable of facing down the giants of the printing market.

In a combined statement, the two companies noted that ‘The printing industry is in a period of consolidation…scale is increasingly important, especially in R&D and manufacturing.’ To this end, Canon stands to benefit from Oce’s higher-end line of products, which sell largely to banks and offices, and will supplement the Japanese company’s own ranges of consumer printers. In particular, Oce’s inkjet production printers are a technology foreign to Canon. Meanwhile Oce will gain access to new markets.

Oce will remain an independent print manufacturer, continuing to operate out of its offices in Venlo, Holland. Playing to each brand’s strengths, Canon’s large format operations will in fact be ‘functionally integrated’ into Oce’s Production Printing Division. Oce’s office activities will meanwhile become part of Canon’s Office Imaging Products division. Neither printer company plans to make redundancies. Refinancing of Oce’s existing $704 million in debt will happen as necessary from internally generated funds.