OSAKA -- Japanese electronics maker Kyocera will purchase Germany's Ceyoniq Group, aiming to tap its document management software to grab a bigger share of the copier-scanner market.
Kyocera Document Solutions will acquire the group at the end of October for more than 5 billion yen ($41.1 million). Ceyoniq provides comprehensive document management software, which handles storage, access rights and security on files across a business. The group's customers include financial institutions, German government agencies and other organizations where security is highly prized.
Ceyoniq's software to guard against data leaks will complement Kyocera's multifunctional document centers, which save scanned data to external servers. Kyocera Document will first market the products developed by Ceyoniq alongside its own machines in Germany, before expanding sales to other European nations, North America and Japan. The company hopes to grow sales in its solutions division from the current 40 billion yen per year to around 100 billion yen in three years.
Kyocera, which offers freestanding and tabletop document centers, controls a large share of the market in Germany and certain other nations. But the company lags behind Canon, Ricoh, Fuji Xerox and others in most countries. Kyocera hopes that bundling Ceyoniq's technology with its machines will help it catch up to industry leaders, who develop their own proprietary document management software. The global market for such software is around 650 billion yen and growing at over 10% per year, Kyocera says. Document management technology is becoming a critical factor in attracting customers to office machines.
(Nikkei)