We get asked this question often enough that it is worth answering in writing.
The premise of the question is fair. The Pacific printer market has multiple competent suppliers. Kyocera, Toshiba, Canon, Brother, Epson, Sharp and HP all sell credible multifunction printer ranges to Pacific businesses. Some of those vendors are materially cheaper than Ricoh on sticker price. A few are cheaper on cost-per-page. None of them are bad products.
So when a procurement-led prospect asks why they should pay more for a Ricoh device when a Kyocera device of comparable speed and feature set costs less, the question deserves a serious answer.
The honest version of that answer is below. It is not “Ricoh is best at everything.” It is the operational reasoning that led us to standardise on Ricoh as our primary hardware partner, the things Ricoh brought to the relationship that other vendors did not, and the things we would say honestly if a prospect’s circumstances pointed to a different brand being the right answer for them.
How we actually chose
When we evaluated hardware partners for our Pacific operation, we were not buying printers — we were buying a five-year operational relationship that would determine the service experience of every customer we signed.
The evaluation criteria were:
- Engine reliability at Pacific volumes — duty cycle, paper handling, behaviour under heat and humidity, performance on locally available paper stocks (which are often not the substrates the device was originally tested against).
- Parts strategy for the South Pacific specifically — what is held in regional warehousing, what international freight times are committed to, how much of the part catalogue we could realistically stock in-country.
- Technician training and certification programmes — how thoroughly we could train and certify our own Pacific-based technicians, how often the manufacturer updates the curriculum, how the programme accommodates the realities of remote-from-headquarters operation.
- Regional support depth — the manufacturer’s own escalation path for problems our technicians cannot resolve locally, the responsiveness of their regional team, the cultural fit of working with them across a multi-market footprint.
- Product roadmap transparency — whether we could see what was coming, plan against it, and trust that the products we standardised on this year would still be supported five years from now.
- Sustainability and end-of-life commitments — what happens to a device at the end of its working life, whether the manufacturer takes the recycling commitment seriously, whether the consumables programme reflects genuine environmental thinking or marketing.
We did not pick the supplier with the cheapest unit price. We picked the supplier whose answers across all six criteria gave us the highest confidence in our ability to deliver the service standard we had committed to for our customers.
What Ricoh brought that the alternatives did not
We will name what we mean specifically, because vague comparisons are how this conversation usually goes wrong.
Engineering choices that held up on Pacific paper. A surprising amount of Pacific printer service work comes back to the substrate. Paper available locally in Pacific markets is often not the same grade as what the device was originally tested against in Japan, Germany or the United States. Some manufacturers’ devices handle that gracefully; others jam more often, wear consumables faster, or produce visibly inconsistent output. Ricoh’s engines, in our experience, are at the more forgiving end of that spectrum. The cost saving from a cheaper device that jams twice as often is not a saving.
A parts strategy that reaches into Pacific markets. Ricoh’s regional parts distribution into Australia and New Zealand is comparable to most major brands. Where the difference shows up is the willingness — and the operational mechanism — to forward-stock significant parts inventory at our in-country warehouses across Samoa, Vanuatu, Tonga and the Solomon Islands. We have that arrangement with Ricoh. We do not have it with every alternative supplier we evaluated.
A technician programme that actually trains Pacific technicians. Ricoh has invested in certifying our local technicians to handle their full product range, including the senior-grade certifications that allow our team to do component-level diagnostics and major service work on production presses without flying engineers in. Other vendors run training programmes that are less generous on certification depth, particularly for partners operating outside the major regional markets.
A roadmap we could plan against. The IM Cxx10 family that anchors our office MFP catalogue was clearly signalled in advance, supplied on a stable timeline, and is still being actively developed five years after launch. We have had vendor relationships where product line transitions caught the partner off-guard, leaving customers mid-contract on devices the vendor had quietly deprioritised. Ricoh has been materially more disciplined about this than most.
A sustainability story we could actually point at. Ricoh’s published commitments on recycled-content materials, end-of-life recycling and consumables programmes are concrete and audited, not just marketing language. Customers increasingly ask for evidence of these things, particularly government, education and ESG-focused private sector buyers. We can show evidence rather than ask the customer to take our word for it.
None of this means Ricoh is best at every individual axis. Kyocera arguably has the better cost-per-page on lower-volume mono A4 devices. Brother is a stronger choice for very small offices buying outright. Some specialist applications — high-end production presses, ultra-low-volume scenarios, niche industrial applications — point to other vendors as the natural answer. We say so when that is the case. But for the mainstream Pacific office market that makes up the bulk of our customer base, the Ricoh proposition was the one whose total operational picture held up under our evaluation criteria.
What this means for customers
The choice we made on supplier shows up in the customer experience in three concrete ways.
Parts that are usually in-country when you need them. Because Ricoh’s parts strategy supports the in-country stocking we want to do, we hold meaningful parts inventory across all four Pacific markets. When a fuser fails on a Tuesday, our technician can usually replace it on the Wednesday. The same outcome on a different supplier whose regional model does not support in-country stocking would be measured in weeks.
Technicians with the certification to resolve faults locally. Our Pacific-based technicians can resolve the majority of service incidents fully without escalating offshore. The Ricoh certification programme supports the depth of training we need to make that operationally true. With other vendors, more incidents would route to regional engineers, and the time-to-resolution would stretch accordingly.
A relationship that has not changed under us. The customer-facing relationship we have with our supplier is materially more stable than the printer industry average. Our customers do not see this directly — but they benefit from it every time a service decision needs an escalation that our supplier honours quickly.
When we would point you somewhere else
If a prospect’s situation points to a different brand being the right answer, we say so — even if it means we do not win the deal.
A small office printing a few hundred pages a month, buying outright, with no expectation of ongoing service, often gets better value from a Brother or HP small-business device than from a Ricoh-on-managed-print contract. The Ricoh contract is sized for organisations where service matters; in scenarios where it doesn’t, the cheaper unit is the right answer.
A specialist production application — long-run packaging, label converting at industrial scale, very specific finishing requirements — may point to a Konica Minolta, HP Indigo or Komori device as the better fit. We do not pretend to cover every production-printing niche; where we are not the right answer, we will tell you and refer to a specialist where we know one.
A government or large-enterprise procurement process where standardisation on an existing different-brand fleet is already in place often makes the switching cost greater than the incremental service benefit. We will tell you that too rather than pretend the migration is free.
The reason we are willing to point prospects elsewhere when their situation calls for it is because the alternative — selling them something that does not fit their actual need — costs us more in the medium term than the lost deal does. The customers who get the right answer come back; the customers who get a forced answer do not.
What this comes back to
The choice of hardware partner is one of the most consequential strategic decisions a managed-service business makes. We made ours on the basis of operational fit with Pacific market realities, not on which brochure looked best. The result — the customer experience we are able to deliver — is what we sell now.
If you are evaluating a printer fleet and would like our honest read on whether Ricoh is the right answer for your specific scenario — including the situations where it is not — get in touch. We will tell you what we would tell our own procurement team.