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12 August 2022

The Federal Court today declared that 38 contract terms used in contracts entered into by Fujifilm Business Innovation Australia or Fujifilm Leasing Australia (together, Fuji) with many thousands of small businesses are unfair, following court action by the ACCC.

The Court declared the unfair contract terms void and unenforceable. Fuji was also ordered to stop enforcing these terms in current small business contracts and to cease using these terms in 11 types of standard form contracts with small businesses for the next five years.

The orders apply to 11 types of standard form contracts Fuji entered with small businesses for printers and related software. The unfair contract terms included terms providing for automatic renewal, excessive exit fees and unilateral price increases.

“We took this court action because Fuji’s unfair contract terms allowed this large company to leverage the significant power imbalance between it and small business customers to impose unnecessary and unjustifiable terms on these businesses,” ACCC Deputy Chair Mick Keogh said. more here

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Update:

"word on the street" is:

Fujifilm has/is about to send out two letters to all affected customers.

letter 1: (trying to capture which customers are under 20 users - the vertical affected)

letter 2: if > 20 users none of the above applies if < 20 users then your options are...blah blah.

Back in the trenches, Fuji is bleeding users, from just our experience they don't seem to be winning many deals and their local sales force is spent/jaded from the customer pushback over the ACCC incident.

Some of their plans to combat the losses is dumping a desktop A3 on the market at below market rates (sub 2.5k A3 desktop).

VAR's are also getting the box with 3 years warranty allowing service rev to go straight to var instead of Fujifilm.

A slight problem with the above is it's sold out for months... back orders are huge currently and while this occurs Fuji signed agreements are not that hard to cajole over to a machine that's available now.

All in all perfect for Xerox Corp to enter the APAC market.

Its highly volatile across angles (staff dissatisfaction both support and sales, stock shortages, long-term management issues left unresolved and so on).

There are a good 5 smallish potential acquisitions ($10-20 million) that would be simple acquisitions for an experienced OEM like Xerox who is skilled in acquiring large VAR's / Dealers and folding their operations into Xerox's tested sales/support engine.

The only questions hanging over this potential game player in the market is WHICH devices would Xerox lead with?

I'll leave the speculation to the fellow colleagues in P4P who no doubt have a few theories they may be willing to impart.

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