MFP Wars "Copier/MFP Manufacturers to Buy Printer Manufacturers"

With the recent aquisition of Oce by Canon, what's next for the likes of Xerox, Ricoh, Canon and KonicaMinolta? There's no more Ikon, Danka and Global like companies left for them to buy. Could it be possible that the next wave of consolidation comes from Printer Manufactuers, or better yet do some of the Print Manufacturers secure thier market share with the aquisition of low level players such as Muratec, Toshiba, Sharp, and Kyocera?

I count at least 13 prominant players that need to capture printed or copied pages, they are Xerox, Canon (Oce), Toshiba, Ricoh, KonicaMinolta, Kyocera, Sharp, Samsung, Epson, Okidata, Lexmark, Brother and HP. The all want to capture as many pages as they can.

On the printer side you've got Epson, HP, Lexmark, Brother, Okidata and Samsung. Heard on the street is that Lexmark and Oki were hit hard with the recession, while Epson and HP and Samsung remained strong. Ricoh has InfoPrint and has somewhat of a relationship with Lexmark, do we look for Ricoh to acquire Lexmark somewhere in the not to distant future. Copier companies purchasing printer companies is not uncommon and has happened before. In 1998 QMS was purchased by Minolta Corp and in 2000 Xerox purchased Tektronix, we all know the old saying "what comes around goes around". Thoughts are this will be next round of consolidation for the imaging indsutry.

But, we can look at this another way, what really defines the captured page? Can we also look at this as a "managed page"? If so, could the Giants of the Industry look to acquire some of the largest Managed Print Providers in the not to distant future? I tend to think some of the largest Managed Print Providers are a good bet for takeovers, or acquisition and maybe the quickest road for expansion for either the printer or copier manufacturers. Anyway you slice it, there's still trillions of pieces of paper that can be captured, question is who is gonna make fire the first salvo.

-=Good Selling=-