Canon bids to buy Dutch print maker Océ
Dutch print maker Océ is being sold to Japanese electronics giant Canon for 730 million euros, the companies announced on Monday. The struggling Dutch company had been looking for a partner to keep its head above water for quite some time.
The deal still has to be approved by the shareholders, but if it goes through Océ will remain an independent division within Canon, with its own brand and Dutch headquarters. Océ specialises in high-quality colour, wide-format and high-speed printers.
The company announced in the summer of 2008 it was looking for a takeover
partner, because it lacked the scale to grow independently. The economic
crisis then put the print maker deeper into trouble and forced it to
restructure. It was 700 million euros in debt and made 9 percent of its
staff, now at 22,000, redundant recently. It feared its respected research
department would also suffer if it had to cut back more.
Japanese Canon is about ten times the size of Océ and yields two-thirds of its 32 billion turnover from printers. It has enjoyed strong sales of digital single-lens reflex cameras in recent years, but its sales of photocopiers and precision machinery have been hit hard by the global economic downturn.
Océ ceo Rokus van Iperen at a press conference in Amsterdam said the two companies are "a great fit" and will create "the overall number one presence in the printing industry". He also pointed out the benefits for the shareholders, as the 8.60 euro bid per share is 70 percent higher than Friday's closing price. However in 2007 the value was as high as 18 euros and it was consistently above 15 euros in the years before that.