MFP Weekend Industry Notes 7/26/09

Special thanx to Print4Pay Hotel members for this!

Details on Canon’s own leasing division, Canon Financial Services:
- Run by Richard Palmieri – President
- Funded by Canon
- Has enough reserves to support leasing services for a minimum of 5 years
- The Equipment Leasing & Finance Association (www.elfaonlinelorg) recently reported that in last 6 months, banks have only approved 65% of copier leases
- Canon has approved 90% of copier leases submitted by its branches and dealers
- Can customize the lease to cover ancillary charges associated with an equipment lease
- Due to tight credit market, has received more leases from its dealers than ever before
- Primary objective is to move as much Canon hardware as possible

Canon is objecting in court to the proposed sale of assets of Ritz Camera, which has a large debt to Canon. Canon claims that the proposed sale to RCI, is actually a disguised transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to an entity controlled by Ritz’s former CEO.

Details on Oce’s in-house leasing division:
- named Oce’ Financial Services
- partially backed by Oce’
- run by Marc Gingold – President
- 2/3’s or 25,000 of Oce’ equipment owners use Oce’ in-house leases
- Calls its cpc lease the “Term Rental”
- Covers complementary products such as off-line finishing or paper handling equipment

Details on Toshiba’s in-house leasing division:
- leases are actually held by US Bank, GE Capital or De Lage Landen
- run by Bill Melo, VP of Marketing

Toshiba’s past was the topic of discussion during a copier bid review in the Town of Randall, Wisconsin. Town supervisor, Robert Gehring, reminded the other supervisors that in 1987, Toshiba was accused of illegally selling technology to the Russans to improve the stealth capabilities of the USSR’s nuclear submarines, thus putting the USA at risk during the cold war. This lead to the arrest and prosecution of two top executives, and was the basis for a best selling novel and movie from Tom Clancy called; “Hunt for Red October”. Mr. Gehring therefore refuses to back any bid award for Toshiba products.

Print Audit, maker of managed print services software, announced a new feature where it will report on meters from machines in the field, even if they are not part of a managed print services program.

Hewlett Packard announced it has placed an Indigo 7000 production color system at R&R Images of Scottsdale, AZ. The print shop also installed HP SmartStream Producton Pro IN200 print server, SmartStream Director & DirectSmile for a complete web to print system with variable data. The shop claims that they can not handle a $3 order and still make a profit.

Xerox reported its last quarter’s financials:
- profit tumbled down 35%
- earnings of $140 million as compared with $215 million one year ago
- revenue fell 18% to $3.73 billion from $4.53 billion
- Xerox’s CEO, Ursula Burns, stated; “we expect revenue will remain under pressure during the balance of the year
- Goldman Sachs reports that global technology spending will drop another 8% this year
- Equipment sales dropped 29% to $828 million
- Service/supply revenue dropped 14%
- gross margin of 40.2%
- color pages up 12%, b/w pages down 5%


History of inkjet printing:
- In 1867, Lord Kelvin described a process for using electrostatic electricity to control the release of droplets of ink with a pressure pump
- In 1878, Lord Rayleigh discovered how to make droplets of ink from a nozzle that were uniform in size
- In 1946, the Radio Corporation of America patented drop on demand piezo crystal electric device but never produced a product, as they were inventing the television at the same time. Piezo crystals create an acoustic wave as it vibrates through the nozzle and causes stream of ink to break into droplets at regular intervals
- In 1961, Richard Sweet, a Stanford electrical engineer, received a patent which led to the A. B. Dick Videograph 9600 in 1969 to print barcodes on cans.
- In 1962 was invented by C.R. Winston as the Teletype Inktronic
- In 1968, Dr. Cumming and Richard Sweet received patent to generate characters with inkjet
- In 1973, Mead Paper launched the Dijit inkjet printer
- In 1977, the first piezoelectric inkjet printer, the PT-80, was launched by Siemens of Germany
- In 1977, Canon researcher, Ichiro Endo, accidentally dropped a hot soldering iron onto a syringe full of ink, which caused the ink to heat up and spray out of syringe. This led to invention of bubblejet thermal inkjet technology.
- In 1978, Hewlett Packard’s John Vaught , convinced company to use Canon’s bubblejet technology.
- In 1984, Mead Paper sold Dijit technology to Kodak, which became the Diconix
- In 1985, Canon launches first commercial bubblejet product, the BJ-80.
- In 1993, Kodak sold Diconix to Scitex
- In 1993, Epson launches its first piezoelectric inkjet printer, the Stylus 800

Kodak announced it has placed a NexPress M700 (relabeled Canon imagePRESS C7000VP) to Classic Printers of Houston, TX.

Kodak announced that its MarketMover program now supports Kodak InSite web-to-print system. MarketMover is a program to educate printshops how to market digital output.

IBM is being sued for allegedly failing to pay its workers overtime for pre-shift duties at its large Atlanta call center.

eCopy has renamed its award winning desktop application; “eCopy Desktop” to “eCopy PaperWorks”. It is also offering end users a free trial version via download from its website.

The annual trade show in England for production print, “Total Print! Expo”, was postponed indefinitely due to slow economy.

Des Plaines Office Equipment, a copier dealer in Chicago, announced it will now also market phone systems from Access One.

Workers at the Meridian plant in Canada reached an agreement with Xerox to allow the company to remove its toner making equipment from the shut down plant.

XPEDX, a division of International Paper, announced it has acquired Gould Paper Corp. of Vancouver, Canada.

NEC of Japan announced it is seeking to raise $2.1 billion in capital for growth. During the past fiscal year it reported a loss of $3 billion.

Another company which owns obscure patents is collecting money from manufacturers in the printing industry through the courts. Whetstone Electronics, owns two patents that involve the interface between a computer and print engine. The first company to settle out of court with Whetstone is Agfa of Germany for an undisclosed sum.

Xante’ claims great success with its Ilumina Digital Envelope Press+, which uses an Okidata LED color engine to print on #10 envelopes at 60 per minute. The company claims to have sold 30 of the systems recently to businesses in south Florida.

Lexmark stock shares fell 20% when the company reported its last quarter’s financials:
- 80% drop in earnings.
- Net income fell to $17 million from $83.7 million
- Revenue fell 21% to $904.6 million from $1.14 billion

-=Good Selling=-