Where Are They Now?
The industry since 2000 — an elegy
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
A confession before the accounting: every other page of this issue pretends it is still the year 2000. This one is written from 2026, in an office with no copier in it, about the companies that filled the ones that were. Consider it a wake with good catering.
The Consolidation Map — 2000–2026
| 1990s brand | What happened | When | Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mita | Bankrupt 1998; rescued by Kyocera as Kyocera Mita | Jan 2000 | Kyocera Document Solutions (renamed 2012); still building MFPs |
| Konica / Minolta | Merged into Konica Minolta Holdings; exited cameras 2006 | Aug 2003 | Konica Minolta — office MFPs + AccurioPress production print |
| Savin | Acquired by Ricoh | Mar 1995 | Long a Ricoh US channel badge; folded into Ricoh branding |
| Gestetner (also Nashuatec, Rex-Rotary) | Gestetner Holdings bought by Ricoh; became NRG Group | Sep 1995 | Retired in favour of Ricoh through the late 2000s (exact dates unverified) |
| Lanier | Acquired by Ricoh | Jan 2001 | Absorbed; the badge lingered in the US for years |
| IKON (mega-dealer) | Bought by Ricoh for $1.6B | Nov 2008 | The direct-sales arm of Ricoh Americas |
| Xerox | Near-death 2000–02 (~$18B debt, weeks of cash); SEC settlement 2002; Mulcahy turnaround; $34B hostile bid for HP withdrawn 2020 | 2000–20 | Xerox Holdings; closed $1.5B Lexmark purchase 1 Jul 2025 |
| Fuji Xerox | Xerox sold its 25% stake to Fujifilm ($2.3B), ending the 57-year joint venture | 2019–21 | Fujifilm Business Innovation (renamed 2021); Apeos line, sold worldwide |
| Danka (mega-dealer) | US business sold to Konica Minolta (~$240M); UK plc wound itself up | 2008–09 | Gone — voluntary liquidation |
| Océ | Canon tender offer (~€730M); 100% by end-2011 | 2010 | Canon Production Printing (renamed 2020) |
| Toshiba | Copier business transferred to subsidiary Toshiba TEC | Jan 1999 | Toshiba Tec e-STUDIO MFPs; manufacturing now in the Etria JV |
| Sharp | Two-thirds stake sold to Foxconn (¥388.8B) | Aug 2016 | Still makes office MFPs, Foxconn-owned |
| Samsung (printers) | Printer/copier business sold to HP ($1.05B) | Nov 2017 | HP’s laser/A3 line; Samsung out of print |
The analog copier did not see much of the new century. Digital had won on cost and connectivity by our cover date, and by the early-to-mid 2000s the analog machine was effectively out of production across the majors — industry consensus, this; nobody recorded a verified last machine, a detail this magazine would have laminated.
The survivor declined to keep the name. The copier became the MFP — copier, network printer, scanner and fax in one chassis — and “copier company” became “document solutions company,” a rename Kyocera made literal in 2012. The sale changed too: boxes gave way to managed print services — fleet audits, cost-per-page, security — and Ricoh’s 2008 purchase of IKON was largely a purchase of the customer relationship itself. Xerox, post-Lexmark, claims the MPS crown. The demo became an audit.
The glory went upmarket, to production print: Xerox’s iGen3 (October 2002), Canon’s imagePRESS (2006, reinforced by Océ), Konica Minolta’s AccurioPress rebrand (2016), plus production inkjet. Short-run colour that once went to offset now runs through very fast descendants of the office copier.
The endgame tell is Etria, launched 1 July 2024: Ricoh (85 per cent) and Toshiba Tec merged MFP development and manufacturing into one joint venture, separate brands intact; OKI joined in 2025. Rivals sharing a factory is what a mature, shrinking market looks like.
The elegy
The salesman went first, in a manner of speaking. The demo-room closer of the 1990s — the man who could make a stapler-sorter sound like a moral obligation — became an “MPS consultant,” selling multi-year contracts and clicks rather than boxes. The independent dealer channel consolidated relentlessly beneath him: IKON and Danka, the two giant mega-dealers of our era, were both swallowed in 2008, by Ricoh and Konica Minolta respectively. A good year for acquisitions; a poor one for long lunches.
The showroom followed. Machines are now specified from fleet assessments and web portals, not walk-around demonstrations, and the surviving dealer showrooms are lean “customer experience centres” — a phrase no 1990s sales manager could have produced without lighting a cigarette first. There is nowhere, any longer, to take a schoolboy.
And the brochure — the glossy A4 spec sheet with the airbrushed machine on its grey sweep — became a PDF download, and then a web configurator page. The photography budget went with it; today’s product shot is a render of a machine that may not yet exist. We note, for the record, that this entire magazine exists because brochures were once objects: things that arrived in envelopes, were hoarded in a briefcase, and were worth a telephone call to a patient man at Canon. What you are holding — the word is used loosely — is the last brochure of the analog era. It is a PDF.
The badges went quietly: the great name-plurality of the decade — one engine dressed as Savin, Gestetner, Lanier, Nashuatec and Rex-Rotary — collapsed into single global brands, with rebadging surviving only in OEM corners and shared factories. And the machines themselves are collector items or e-waste; toner and parts for the 1990s consoles are effectively extinct outside enthusiast stockpiles. Somewhere an NP-8580 waits for a drum that is not coming.
The paper, meanwhile
The paperless office never quite arrived — this magazine spent a decade watching it not arrive — but office print volumes eroded steadily through the 2010s, and then COVID emptied, in 2020, the very offices the machines lived in. Hybrid work made the damage structural: the analyst consensus is that office page volumes never fully recovered to 2019 levels, though the precise percentages vary by analyst and every figure should be read as an estimate. The market’s answer has been fewer, smaller, cloud-connected devices — A4 machines near the desks instead of one big A3 down the corridor — with the scanner half of the MFP now earning its keep as the on-ramp to digitisation. The copier’s last job, it turns out, is helping the office stop needing one.
Handing back
And so back to the editor, and to the year 2000, where the rest of this issue is happy to remain. The machines are consolidating; the paper is declining; the industry that spent our decade duplicating everything is itself being collated into fewer and fewer bins. But one filing briefcase — carried through North Sydney, catalogued at age twelve, emptied by time — has nevertheless been reprinted, in full, in the pages around this one. The machines got fewer and the volumes got thinner, and none of it reached the archive. Some things, we are pleased to report, still reproduce reliably.