Ricoh

Ricoh is the office-equipment company people still meet through printers, copiers and managed document systems, with imaging hardware as its old core. By our assessment, its real strength is dependable business equipment and the service side that keeps fleets of machines running in offices and facilities. The limit is that this is a mature market, so the products can feel commodity-like and the old print-and-copy world is not where growth excitement lives. In daily use, Ricoh means toner, maintenance, scanning workflows and the unromantic reality of keeping paper moving. Against other Japanese electronics names, it is more office-infrastructure than consumer gadgetry. The Japanese base fits a company whose value comes from engineering patience rather than flash.