13 percent of OEM’s French staff to lose jobs amid financial troubles.
France24 reports that Ricoh is planning to reduce its French workforce by 13 percent, cutting 338 jobs out of the 2,500 it currently hosts in the country.
Following the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, the OEM announced that it would cut 10,000 jobs worldwide – 10 percent of its global workforce; mainly from 2014 onwards although over 200 employees have reportedly left the company in France since 2010.
A spokesman for Ricoh France, Eric Baudart, explained that the company’s reorganisation “is aimed at safeguarding the competitiveness” of its business and that margins on photocopiers have been squeezed by fierce competition and so the OEM has “arrived at the point where the company can’t support the further collapse of margins”.
In 2012, Ricoh announced layoffs in a number of its US facilities, including its site in Boulder which had a workforce of 700 employees before the job cuts. It also offered voluntary redundancy to a number of its administrative staff at its Telford plant in Shropshire, UK.