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You came from the Ikon side, with the acquisition. How has integrating Ikon expanded what Ricoh can offer? What was the importance, three years later, of that acquisition?
I was on the acquired side, not the acquiring side, but as Ricoh looked at the opportunity with Ikon, I think fundamentally it began with Ikon's share of devices in the market. Ikon was in auction and I think Ricoh concluded that if they lost Ikon to their competition, they'd have lost opportunity. The managed services business of Ikon was probably an unknown asset then, and I'm not even sure we saw in 2008 where the managed document market was headed.
There's the footprint for Ikon -- Ikon alone has 1,700 sites -- that combined with the technology Ricoh brings for capturing information and devices made for a very powerful value proposition for providing equipment and services for our customers. It's very hard for Ricoh to be making this foray into managed document services without the Ikon footprint.
So really, IKON was a key piece of that managed services vision. Part of why I ask is we've seen vendors in this market buying up services companies and integrators. Xerox-ACS is the most obvious example, and Konica Minolta just bought an MSP. Will Ricoh continue to acquire?
If we had anything in mind, I wouldn't comment on it anyway, but that being said, Ricoh Company Ltd. is committed to this space and it's fundamental to our strategy to move to a services company. In the sense that there there are services that can better provided through acquisition than organic development, we will assess those opportunities as they present themselves.
It's much more for us about our ability to make sure our competency is there for what our customers need than whether we acquire that or develop it. It's a way of saying, if the right opportunity came along, I'm sure our CEO would evaluate it, but fundamentally, we have a lot of pieces already to play in this game, and our main focus is leveraging our existing capabilities.
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