In mapping out a timeline of the past 25 years, Jim Coriddi notes remarkable growth spurts walk hand-in-hand with some of the most significant business advances/movements to hit the office technology sector. The senior vice president, dealer division for Ricoh USA, Inc. touched on a trio that have helped the company gain meaningful scale—the switch from analog to digital, ushering color printing into the office and the foray into production equipment.
While Ricoh certainly would be in the foreground of the next big technology to hit the industry, the manufacturer is banking on the next growth catalyst to be just a partnership away. Huddling with its Ricoh Family Group (RFG) of dealers to devise and develop the offerings that can help gain even more traction with end-users is the true path forward, according to Coriddi, and the OEM is gearing its efforts toward that end.
dealer division, Ricoh USA
Ricoh has long been known for its vertical-centric array of solutions for health care, finance, education and manufacturing, among others. This month, Coriddi shares with us the company’s plans regarding an aggressive investment strategy to expand its breadth of solutions as well as a slate of regional and national dealer meetings that can provide insights and recommendations. The hope is that these efforts will lead to crafting a suite of Ricoh offerings that will enable dealers to address their clients’ workflow and efficiency concerns in a profitable way.
It was communication that helped Ricoh and its dealers get through the worst of the pandemic, and it will be collaboration that yields the tools to continue facilitating transformative growth.
Provide some insight into Ricoh’s financial performance during the past 12 months. What were some of the variables that played into how the company performed?
Coriddi: Looking at the calendar year, Ricoh enjoyed a very solid performance as a whole, particularly from a year-over-year perspective for Ricoh North America, which is the U.S. and Canada for our dealer and direct channels. Despite a lot of supply chain challenges, our results have been quite strong. Through December, we’re at 100% hardware-wise of where we were pre-COVID, Ricoh’s 2019 fiscal year. The real star has been production equipment shipped, which is up 19% in hardware compared to pre-COVID. The part that’s really exciting about the production aftermarket is that the print element of it is up 35% compared to pre-pandemic. That was really the stimulus to put us in the position we’re in right now.
To what do you attribute that remarkable gain?
Coriddi: I think we increased our competitiveness. We took away some share, quite frankly, on the hardware side, and aftermarket was spurred by that growth. From what we’ve seen, a lot of the print is being transferred to more production-type units. In-house production printing is increasingly being done on this equipment. So as we’ve placed new units, we’ve seen the volume per unit go up on the production side.
What were some of the highlights for Ricoh during the past year?
Coriddi: The one thing that really comes across is the resiliency of our dealers. Ricoh has always been grateful for its dealer network, and I think that rang true over the past couple years. Through their leadership and agility, our dealers maneuvered especially well through an extremely difficult time when many other businesses were just hoping to stay afloat. Secondly, we’ve increased our focus on many of the changes that have impacted our end-user customers, right down to the materials and support we provide our dealers. For example, we’ve started to provide dealer sales and marketing kits, information and collateral that furnished both sales and marketing people with insights that enable them to have more in-depth conversations with customers and generate demand. It’s talking more about workflow and how our customers need to better manage their business, which ties into selling a lot of the adjacencies such as software and services. We’ve intensified our focus on the changes customers are experiencing and the value we could bring in to address it.
Much has been made about the industry’s supply chain issues, although Ricoh hasn’t been cited among the most affected. Talk about its impact and where you stand currently in regards to inventory.
Coriddi: The good news is that inventory availability improved greatly. We have several popular models that are shipping on a regular basis. The commitment to communication we talked about earlier helped reduce the amount of complaints. We not only kept them abreast of the supply chain situation through email and video updates, but we also really increased communication at the field level. Our regional vice presidents participate in two supply chain meetings per week, and that information is disseminated down to our field team. Our commitment is to be the number-one dealer partner, and that means different things at different times. The past year, it’s been about providing information to better manage the delays on a deal-by-deal situation. Having good information to manage the delays has gotten our dealers through this to ensure they don’t lose deals. That way, our dealers can establish realistic and accurate expectations for their customers. Even when inventory wasn’t available, that communication put our dealers in a better position to manage their customers.
Diversification and digital transformation are two of the biggest talking points in the industry. What kind of guidance have you been providing to RFG dealers?
Coriddi: Everything we’ve talked to our dealers about during the past couple years had to do with their transition from a trusted print provider to becoming more of a consultant who can help customers manage their information. A lot of our emphasis, the information and support we’re providing, is centered more on workflow and better understanding how customers can manage information, so our dealers can figure out how to improve clients’ overall efficiency. That’s what’s going to lead to a lot more expansion of the business. That’s been the predominant focus for us.
Recently, we launched a number of regional dealer events. It’s great to be back to meeting face-to-face, and we’re looking to leverage those interactions and take partnering with our dealer community to the next level. We designed this regional event with the help of our National Dealer Council and RDNA, which is a group of next-generation Ricoh dealer leaders. We had our first one Dec. 1 in Charlotte, and it was exciting just to be back together in person. With the help of our National Dealer Council, we incorporated think tanks into the event. It creates a healthy interaction on key topics such as growing annuity and emerging trends—two provocative topics. These events are all about Ricoh providing its vision, direction and plans while encouraging the dealers to share their experiences and success stories. Ricoh has a pretty in-depth view of the customer because of our large direct base, and we get a lot of feedback from our customers. That helped produce a great exchange of ideas. It all comes back to taking a more consultative approach to understanding and having conversations with customers at a deeper level about how to manage their overall information.
Does Ricoh have plans for a 2023 ConvergX dealer meeting, or will it be just the regional events?
Coriddi: This year, we’re actually going to do both, since there is such a pent-up need to interact with our dealers. The second one is going to be in Philadelphia [this month], and the third one will be in Austin, Texas, in March. From there, we’ll be planning a larger-scale national event in the fall. During these regional events, we’re not only providing information for dealers, but we’re also interacting and getting influenced by them. That way, by the time we get to our national event, we’ll be able to launch our new next level of programs and portfolio for the dealers. So there’s a strategy, a method to the madness.
Last April, Ricoh purchased Fujitsu’s scanner business for roughly $650 million. Talk about your plans for incorporating it into your office equipment portfolio.
Coriddi: We have multiple dealers that are currently getting scanners from Fujitsu, and eventually we’ll work toward unifying things. For right now, it’s business as usual, but we definitely see a fit in the overall portfolio. It does make sense for the U.S. dealers.
Ricoh didn’t need to go far in acquiring Cenero, an A/V, UCaaS and IT solutions provider. Why is Cenero a good fit for Ricoh, and what does it bring to the table?
Coriddi: It was easy to negotiate with them, since they’re only about seven miles away from Ricoh’s headquarters. We see conferencing services as a significant growth market. Forecasters Frost & Sullivan predict that by 2025, this business is going to grow 5X. Cenero provides the physical hardware as well as the full services. We see this as a connected adjacency toward helping customers manage their information.
You’ll note a pattern with our acquisitions; whether it be a DocuWare or a Cenero, we’re acquiring the entire IP so we can incorporate more, and in a smoother manner, into our overall portfolio. Right now, Cenero isn’t an offering through our dealer channel. We started with our direct channel, and in a very short time, we’ve seen how these adjacencies are connecting with our current customer base. So far, the results have been quite positive. Down the road, we’ll see how it fits into our dealer business model.
What can we expect to see this year from Ricoh in terms of new product rollouts?
Coriddi: When we think in terms of technology launches, there’s the more conventional hardware side, then there’s the software and other adjacencies. You’ll see more technology geared toward what we project to be the greatest growth opportunities for our dealers right now. That means production, office color and work from home. Those are key elements from a hardware standpoint that we’ll be refreshing. Everything we’re looking to do is going to have elements geared toward the cloud, certainly with a heavy emphasis on everything from security to workflow solutions. There will be more acquisitions from Ricoh, adding more and more of those adjacent opportunities. We’ll have increased customized software workflow elements going into the dealer portfolio.
Is there anything new on the horizon from a program or partnership standpoint?
Coriddi: One of the things that’s going to be front and center from a program standpoint with our dealers is the investment in our Digital Services Center (DSC). Our premise and philosophy here is to “Build, Buy or Partner.” In other words, coming up with solutions that we’re going to design and build ourselves, or buying a company such as DocuWare or partnering with an outside software-type company to make the most impactful solution. What does that mean to the dealer? While we’re doing that, we’re also establishing what are our CEO Carsten Bruhn is calling “the dealer digital factory.” We’re taking a lot of input from key subject-matter experts on the dealer side, and we’re looking to build out a lot of those solutions that fit into the dealer business model and their capability to implement them. The main approach is devising dealer-specific solutions with input from not only our DSC, but also from our dealers.
What are Ricoh’s goals for 2023?
Coriddi: A lot of what we’re doing at these regional events speaks to partnering closer with our dealers to help increase real value for them. More and more, we see our advantage, our differentiation—the vehicle we’re going to use to grow—as being more reliant on our ability to partner with our dealers. It’s not just about the equipment anymore, it’s about managing information. In the past, you could track growth through technology development: the movement from analog to digital produced growth; bringing color into the office was huge; and then Ricoh moved into production, and growth soared again. Now, we’re at the point where growth will be about customizing real valuable solutions for our customers. Our primary goal today is to find ways to continue to expand our partnering with dealers. The second part, which plays into that, is expanding our portfolio of solutions and the support we can provide for them.
The one thing that hasn’t changed is we’re in a mature industry, and we have to keep finding ways to differentiate our dealers with their customers. We’re going to work with our dealers to expand that customer conversation that their salespeople are having, going deeper into customer workflow and how customers are managing their information. At the end of the day, we have to grow. With experts projecting a flat-to-slow growing environment, that means we have to grab more market and wallet share. But we need to be able to do that by putting our dealers in a profitable situation. It’s not growth for the sake of growing, it’s growing profitable business. And we feel that all ties together with this ability to partner and provide more expansive solutions. I think we’re in a good position to make 2023 a successful campaign.
