Ricoh buys Pentax.

[agorabasta]

My point was made as an investor in Japan, not as a shareholder in general.

My point is that the Japanese specifics play for them both rather equally; so the universal basics are quite revealed in comparison.

And I'm quite aware of the Japanese financial investment specifics, btw...

[KevinBarrett]

I wonder how much Pentax would have been worth before they introduced the confounding Q system?

[sgt_hepplefinger]

That's the capitalisation at book value (the price to which the shares were originally issued times the number of shares).

That would be quite deceptive of them, and punishable at that. They even mention the date for the estimate quoted, so you must be wrong either way you treat it.

Anyway, the sales figures are all that matters as long as they don't lose money selling their produce.

They really are very much comparable to Canon.

Actually I wasn't quite correct - capitalization is the sum of stockholder's equity (that is the capital the shareholders gave the company when the shares were issued), long-term debt and retained earnings (that is earnings that weren't paid out as dividends to the shareholders). And it's not deceptive at all.

I wouldn't know why the sales are so important. Canon has ten times the net income and eight times the earnings per share. Canon is much bigger.

[agorabasta]

The market capitalisation is the value placed on a company by the stock market and is an identity - ie the number of shares in issue times the share price. That's it! And by that measure Ricoh is a minnow by comparison with Canon.

The market capitalisation is the current share value times the number of shares issued. Nothing else, no debts/liabilities further subtracted as they are already weighed in the current share value.

So it really escapes me how is it not comparable -

Ricoh - 135.3 billion yen (as of March 31, 2011)
Canon - 174,762 million yen (As of December 31, 2010)

Then mind the March turmoil...

Then the sales are less than twice apart, that must mean the shareholders like the Ricoh better given the market cap...

Come on, how on earth is it possible to argue against the obviously stated statistics (unless you're too deep into the bad insider info)???

[artington]

That's the capitalisation at book value (the price to which the shares were originally issued times the number of shares).

That would be quite deceptive of them, and punishable at that. They even mention the date for the estimate quoted, so you must be wrong either way you treat it.

Anyway, the sales figures are all that matters as long as they don't lose money selling their produce.

They really are very much comparable to Canon.

Actually I wasn't quite correct - capitalization is the sum of stockholder's equity (that is the capital the shareholders gave the company when the shares were issued), long-term debt and retained earnings (that is earnings that weren't paid out as dividends to the shareholders). And it's not deceptive at all.

I wouldn't know why the sales are so important. Canon has ten times the net income and eight times the earnings per share. Canon is much bigger.

What you describe is capital employed. Capitalisation is the value placed on a company by the stock market,ie no of shares in issue multiplied by share price.

[agorabasta]

Actually I wasn't quite correct - capitalization is the sum of stockholder's equity (that is the capital the shareholders gave the company when the shares were issued), long-term debt and retained earnings (that is earnings that weren't paid out as dividends to the shareholders).

You still are quite obviously wrong.

[sgt_hepplefinger]

What you describe is capital employed. Capitalisation is the value placed on a company by the stock market,ie no of shares in issue multiplied by share price.

Capital employed is also referred to as capitalization and I doubt very much that the figure Ricoh quotes on the page agorabasta linked to is the market capitalization. Btw Canon quotes "common stock" instead.

[sgt_hepplefinger]

The market capitalisation is the value placed on a company by the stock market and is an identity - ie the number of shares in issue times the share price. That's it! And by that measure Ricoh is a minnow by comparison with Canon.

The market capitalisation is the current share value times the number of shares issued. Nothing else, no debts/liabilities further subtracted as they are already weighed in the current share value.

So it really escapes me how is it not comparable -

Ricoh - 135.3 billion yen (as of March 31, 2011)
Canon - 174,762 million yen (As of December 31, 2010)

Ok - question for the resident financial expert. Ricoh currently has 744.91 million shares outstanding (http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/o ... bol=7752.T). Their were traded for 976 yen on March 31. Now please explain the maths to me you have to employ to arrive at a market capitalization of 135.3 billion yen from these figures.

[artington]

Replying to Sgt Hepplefinger - No matter, we both know that Canon is much bigger than Ricoh. Indeed I've just checked on Bloomberg and the Market value of Cnon as at close in Tokyo this morning is $5,068bn Yen ($63bn) and that of Ricoh, $661b Yen ($13bn). Can't get clearer than that.

[pakodominguez]

I would say that this closely echoes the ultimately failed Konica takeover of Minolta. Ricoh, like Konica at that time, is/was an office machinery company (copiers, duplicators) with a secondary interest in cameras. Unlike Konica, it has no interest in sensitised materials.

but Minolta was also an office machines company with a secondary interest in cameras so there was quite a lot of synergy. Imo there was more sense to the KM merger than this but ultimately time will tell.

Hoya looks to be the winner in all this - they got the profitable medical imaging business of Pentax that they wanted.

I don't know how much each division worth, but Hoya paid 640 million Euros for Pentax and Ricoh claim they are paying 85 million Euros for the photographic division -I guess the Patents Pentax own are not that valuables...

[agorabasta]

No matter, we both know that Canon is much bigger than Ricoh. Indeed I've just checked on Bloomberg and the Market value of Cnon as at close in Tokyo this morning is $5,068bn Yen ($63bn) and that of Ricoh, $661b Yen ($13bn). Can't get clearer than that.

You're quite right about the market capitalisation, so they must be using some different property to call 'capitalisation' at their official corporate pages that I linked.
My educated guess would be that it's more like the book value they call 'capitalisation' there.

Anyway, the size of the company is determined by their sales volume. And here Ricoh's is more than half Canon's volumes. Check the same Reuters you linked above -
http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/f ... bol=7751.T
http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/f ... bol=7752.T

So no way is Canon 'much bigger'. Bigger - yes, but not by much. The Canon digital cameras business really is incomparably bigger than Ricoh's, but that used to be a negligible part of Ricoh business; and now they have a chance here. I would love to see a Pentax DSLR made with Ricoh's manufacturing precision and quality.

[bfitzgerald]

I hope DK's assumptions are not correct but to my mind Hoya was not a good company for Pentax..they hugely increased lens prices and did very little system wise to make it more appealing. It was pure corporate take the cash and run..they had their sights set on the other areas such as the medical division.

Ricoh do have some good ideas and some photo background though they're niche player if there ever was one..that's not always a bad thing. But for this to work they will need to invest in K mount and really beef up the system to push Pentax to where it could be. If not and they try to "GXR" Pentax it will likely flop. I'd personally dump the Q project or at least make it into something mildly appealing.

Overall I hope things go well I'm a bit more upbeat with Ricoh then I am with Hoya who'd run K mount into the dust to bust a few $$ out of Pentax. We can speculate all day but only actions and results will really show us what happens.