Ricoh UK unveils plans for two portals as part of growth strategy
Vendor also on lookout for new channel partners to broaden market reach
Document imaging vendor Ricoh UK unveiled its growth plans for 2006 at a special press briefing in New York last week.
The opening of two Ricoh Technology Portals in the UK are at the hub of Ricoh’s plans, but expanding into new markets and attracting IT resellers on board are also on the agenda.
Currently Ricoh has three Techno Portals in the US, one in Canada and one in Japan, but none in the UK. The portals are a showroom/demonstration sites for Ricoh’s range of printers, multifunctional devices, scanners, copiers and cameras.
Takahisa Yokoo, managing director of Ricoh UK, told CRN: “The plan is to open a Techno Portal in Coventry in May or June, and another one at our office in Feltham soon after.”
David Clack, product manager at Ricoh partner Ikon, welcomed the additional portals.
“Ricoh is a key technology partner and we use its portals all the time. As an independent supplier we create solutions by blending numerous product sets from manufacturers so we could not physically house every product in our own showrooms. These portals offer us a convenient way to demonstrate the features and benefits of the Ricoh technology component of any solution we offer,” he said.
Paul Cheetham, Ricoh UK’s director of dealer sales, also revealed that Ricoh is aiming to get into the low-end market this year and has signed its first distributor as a result.
“We’ve identified the SME market as being a key growth sector, and we’ve established a distribution relationship with Computer Connections International which is basically a kind of ‘super distributor for distributors’. Having never used distributors before we didn’t have any infrastructure in place to support 30 or 40 smaller distributors in the UK so we decided to take on a large distributor to help us,” he said.
Additional reporting by Trevor Treharne.