Friday, April 26, 2024
Ricoh Tells Customers to Print Less and Print is Dead
Ricoh Tells Customers to Print Less and Print is Dead
When Yoshinori “Jake” Yamashita took over as global CEO and president of Ricoh in 2017, he put ESG at the very heart of the business.
Yamashita has been with Ricoh since the 1980s, but, according to Management Today’s Éilis Cronin, he now has ambitious net zero plans.
He wants has made it clear he will to reduce Ricoh’s greenhouse gas emissions 63% by 2030 and be net zero by 2050.
The 86-year-old Japanese electronics company Ricoh—best known as a maker of copiers, printers and faxes—has yet again unveiled an ambitious shift away from paper and into the digital realm, aiming to transform into a digital services provider.
For Yamashita, the pathway to sustainability lies in the digital sphere.
In early 2021 he, somewhat controversially, aligned himself with a “print is dead” movement that had accelerated during Covid. The second most-read news story here at RT, in 16 years, was “Ricoh Says it Will Quit Paper and Shareholders Go Crazy.” on March 5, 2021. At the time, according to a Bloomberg report, “Investors cheered the move, with the stock surging 16% in Tokyo on Thursday. That’s the most since 1992, and came even as the Nikkei 225 Stock Average fell 2.1%.”
According to Éilis Cronin, who met Yamashita in 2022, Ricoh’s approach to the printing business is this: “our customers do not use as much physical paper, as a lot of their data and information is digitised. We want to support our customers with end-to-end workflow support.”
Ricoh is now offering a carbon-balanced production printing service, which allows a company to calculate the carbon footprint of each print job, as well as to reduce or optimise the existing print process and offset the remaining carbon emissions. It also offers a service that analyses a company’s printing usage to see where printing can be reduced.
Ricoh is introducing more energy-efficient features to its products, including 40% recycled parts for its multi-function printers, an eco night sensor that saves energy at night and an eco mode that you can use on the weekend, which puts a device into sleep mode six minutes after finishing a print job.
Related:
- Ricoh Says it Will Quit Paper and Shareholders Go Crazy
- Ricoh Recognized Best Cloud Infrastructure
- Ricoh Japan Digitizes Processes for Customer Service
- Ricoh Rolls out Plant-based Ink
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