Japanese office equipment and digital camera maker Ricoh said on June 02 it plans to cut 10,000 jobs world-wide over three years to turn around sagging business operations. Ricoh was hit hard by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and the strong yen and has struggled to recover in the face of stiff competition.
The cuts from a global workforce of over 100,000, Ricoh's first major wave of job losses, will be made both at home and abroad by March 2014. The company currently employs 40,000 people in Japan and 68,900 overseas.
Ricoh did not go into specifics on the planned job cuts but said it would shift 15,000 workers to areas with more growth potential, such as services for corporate clients. The company also plans to revamp or withdraw from operations where it is making losses. Ricoh said its market was still growing in emerging nations, but added that "purchases of printing devices and paper-printing volume are expected to decline in developed countries".
It attributed the rise of a "paperless trend" to the emergence of smartphones and tablet computers. Ricoh saw its group net profit drop sharply in recent years - from more than 100 billion yen ($1.2 billion) in the year to March 2008 to 6.5 billion yen a year later. Net profit for the last business year stood at 19.6 billion yen, down 29.5 percent from the previous year. Sales came to 1.94 trillion yen, missing a target of 2.3 trillion yen.