IBM IN SALES ALLIANCE WITH RICOH

[Anonymous]

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE5000HF20090101
IBM in sales alliance with Japan’s Ricoh
TOKYO 
– IBM and Japanese office equipment maker Ricoh Co Ltd will start
sharing each other’s sales network this year and promote their servers
and printers together, the Nikkei business daily said on Thursday.The
alliance will enable them to offer corporate clients International
Business Machines Corp’s servers and Ricoh’s copiers and printers as a
comprehensive office information technology system, the Nikkei
said.Ricoh expects the new business ties with IBM to help boost its
sales by 100 billion yen ($1.10 billion) in two to three years, the
newspaper said.

The Tokyo-based company, which competes with
Canon Inc , Xerox Corp  and Konica Minolta Holdings in copiers and
printers, forecast 2.15 trillion yen in sales for the current business
year ending March.IBM and Ricoh will start handling each other’s
products in their U.S. sales channels in spring 2009, with the
cooperation set to expand to other regions including Europe and Asia
eventually, the paper said.Officials at Ricoh, which in 2007 bought
IBM’s digital commercial printer business for $725 million, were not
immediately available for comment.Digital commercial printers are used
to print big documents such as product manuals and direct mail quickly
and in large volumes, and are one of the fastest-growing segments of
the office equipment market.Thursday is a public holiday in Japan.

[Author]

January 5, 2009 at 10:56 AM