Where Did They Come From?
Every 2026 nameplate, traced to its ancestors
Where did they come from?
Twelve marques survive. Not one of them arrived unchanged: they merged, they rescued each other from bankruptcy, they divorced after fifty-seven years, or they bought their way in with a chequebook. The genealogy below is fully sourced in the archive; the register never enrols an orphan without asking after its parents.
The Register of Lineages, 2026
| 2026 marque | Descends from | The paperwork |
|---|---|---|
| Canon | Canon + Océ | Océ tender offer Nov 2009 (~€730M); 100% by end-2011; renamed Canon Production Printing 2020 |
| Xerox | Xerox + Lexmark | Near-death 2000–02; Conduent spun off 2017; Lexmark bought for $1.5B, closed 1 Jul 2025 |
| Ricoh | Ricoh + Savin + Gestetner + Nashuatec + Rex-Rotary + Lanier + IKON | Savin Mar 1995; Gestetner group Sep 1995; Lanier Jan 2001; IKON $1.6B, closed 1 Nov 2008; last badges sunset 1 Apr 2023 |
| Kyocera | Mita | Mita bankrupt 1998; rescued as Kyocera Mita Jan 2000; renamed Kyocera Document Solutions 1 Apr 2012 |
| Konica Minolta | Konica + Minolta | Merged 5 Aug 2003; operations integrated 1 Oct 2003; cameras abandoned 2006, copiers kept |
| Sharp | Sharp | Two-thirds sold to Foxconn, completed 15 Aug 2016; the MFP line barely noticed |
| Toshiba Tec | Toshiba | Copiers transferred to Toshiba TEC 1 Jan 1999; manufacturing into the Etria JV 1 Jul 2024 |
| Fujifilm BI | Fuji Xerox | Xerox sold its 25% JV stake for $2.3B (Nov 2019); tech agreement lapsed 31 Mar 2021; renamed next day, in effect |
| HP | HP + Samsung printers | Samsung print business bought for $1.05B, closed 1 Nov 2017; survived Xerox’s $34B siege, withdrawn 31 Mar 2020 |
| Lexmark | IBM printers | Spun from IBM 1991; Ninestar consortium 2016; Xerox 1 Jul 2025 — see above, and overleaf |
| Epson · Brother | Nobody in this cabinet | The insurgents: no 1990s copier ancestry at all, which they regard as a feature |
The pattern is worth stating plainly. Of the twenty-odd nameplates a diligent teenager could collect brochures for in 1993, every single one either died, merged, or was absorbed into one of nine corporate survivors — and the two mega-dealers who sold them, IKON and Danka, were both swallowed in the same year, 2008, by Ricoh and Konica Minolta respectively. The industry did not shrink by failure; it shrank by tidy, lawyer-supervised consolidation, one stock-exchange announcement at a time.
And yet the machines never stopped. Mita went bankrupt and its factories kept building copiers under ceramic new ownership. Fuji Xerox lost its name and kept its engineers. The register takes the machine’s side in all of this: nameplates are corporate weather, but a paper path is a lineage.
The tear-jerker: Mita → Kyocera
The saddest brochure in the 1993 briefcase belonged to Mita — the copier-only company, the one that made nothing else and meant it. It went bankrupt in 1998, the decade’s only outright casualty among the majors. But the rescue is the register’s favourite record: Kyocera took the company whole in January 2000, kept the factories, kept the dealers, and in 2012 renamed the business Kyocera Document Solutions — making literal the industry-wide truth that nobody sells copiers any more. The Mita machines’ descendants ship today wearing TASKalfa badges. The register regards this as a happy ending, and the research department was not consulted about the lump in its throat.
The divorce: Fuji Xerox → Fujifilm BI
Fifty-seven years of joint venture ended in stages — stake sale announced November 2019, technology agreement expiring 31 March 2021, new name the next working day. The genuinely strange consequence: because the old JV split the world into territories, Fujifilm had never once sold an office copier under its own name in Europe or the Americas. The company now rolling Apeos machines into Italy, the UK and the US is not re-entering those markets. It is arriving. A debut, at the age of sixty.
The gatecrasher: HP
HP spent the 1990s selling LaserJets and leaving the copier room to everyone else, which is why the red one had no HP chapter. It bought its way in with Samsung’s printer business in 2017, aimed explicitly at the A3 copier segment, and three years later was fighting off a hostile takeover from Xerox — the category’s inventor attempting to swallow the category’s newest arrival, called off only by a pandemic. The register admits HP on merit and keeps the file open on principle.
2008: the year of the dealers
Machines were only half the consolidation. The two giant dealer networks that sold them — IKON and Danka, each assembled through the 1990s by rolling up hundreds of independent dealerships — were swallowed within months of each other in 2008: IKON by Ricoh for $1.6 billion, Danka’s American business by Konica Minolta for roughly $240 million, the British parent winding itself up soon after. The showroom did not outlive the machines it sold. It is the registered opinion of this magazine that somewhere a demonstration 20-bin sorter is still collating in an empty room, and that nobody has had the heart to tell it.
THE VERDICT — CONSOLIDATION
The industry consolidated the way it photocopied: efficiently, in duplicate, and without asking how anyone felt about it.