Oki have expanded their Asian operations with the launch of a sales office in Beijing. The new office, Oki Trading (Beijing) Company, has already begun operations to meet growing demand in the printer market, and has been earmarked to provide a wider range of Oki products in the future.

The Oki Group currently has nine subsidiaries in China as part of its strategy to provide local-oriented business; and with the inception of Oki Trading (Beijing) expects to achieve 20 billion yen sales by the fiscal year ending March 2009.

Harushige Sugimoto, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Oki Electric says, "China is currently a key focus of the Oki Group, not only as a potential market, but also as a production, development and sales site. As a first step, we hope this new sales office will strengthen our printer sales in China, but beyond that, we intend to expand our product range to include various Oki products such as info-telecom products and semiconductors."

This expansion strategy is not unique to Asia, with Latin America also receiving additional support in the last few months with a print centre in Mexico and regional representative offices in Brazil.

Oki hopes to hold a 10% share in China's color page printer market and a 30% share in the Serial Impact Dot Matrix (SIDM) market by the fiscal year ending March 2008 – with the latter an offshoot of the 70% market growth expected in China's SIDM market by 2009 due to the new tax system which has just been implemented in Beijing.