The merger of Konica and Minolta has been made official, completing a merger seen by many, including the Japanese stock market and major financial analysts, as making enormous sense. Stock prices of both companies have been rising dramatically since the merger plans were announced earlier this year. The integration scheme, announced on August 5, saw the bringing together of six Konica companies, and three Minolta companies and a Corporate Business Support and R&D operation under the banner of Konica Minolta Holdings Inc., based in Tokyo. There are now eight Konica Minolta arms, including Business Technologies, Photo Imaging, Camera, Opto, Medical & Graphics, Sensing, Technology Centre, and Business Experts.
The global group has a worldwide workforce of 40,000. Konica Minolta in Australia will automatically assume second place market position, up from fourth, in the high-speed, multi-functional products.
The local companies are being head quartered in Sydney’s North Ryde technology precinct, and are being shaped to address the rapidly changing business needs of business technology and imaging across an array of disciplines.
According to Noriihiko Oba, the newly appointed managing director of Konica Minolta Business Solutions, the merger will result in a doubling of the current R&D resources, as well as marketing and support.
"We will be able to develop and deliver much expanded imaging capabilities for a range of leading industries under rapidly changing technological circumstances – including networking," says Oba.
He says both Konica and Minolta have traditionally been involved in different areas of imaging and the merger would deliver better innovation, faster.
Konica Minolta will release a raft of new products, especially multi-function printer/copier devices in coming months, and the recently released Konica 8031 and Minolta DiALTA Color CF3102 is already finding favour with smaller print shops wanting to take advantage of short-run, flexible colour printing jobs.
The goals of this global integration are to create a company that targets the top position in the imaging arena by combining the strong optical and business technologies of Konica and Minolta, and to achieve global sales of more than $13.4billion a year.
Planned operating profit for the year to April 1, 2005 is projected to be $200million.
