As IKON looks to expand, Europe stands out as an area offering significant potential for growth. IKON has achieved a strong foothold on the continent, but the opportunity for market penetration remains large. Currently, IKON employs 2,900 people in Europe and maintains operations in six European countries, but the only one with a highly developed presence is the U.K., where IKON’s market share is approximately 12 percent. To a large extent, the areas of growth in the European market mirror those in North America, including color, high volume, and enterprise services.

Europe as a whole represents roughly a $35 billion document services market and, compared with the U.S. market of $50 billion, remains relatively fragmented. As a result, Europe is an important component of IKON’s expansion strategy for Fiscal 2005 and beyond. The company’s expansion plan has two parts. The first is a City Strategy, through which it is selecting targeted markets with the best opportunity for customer expansion, as well as leveraging individual account wins to establish a presence in metropolitan areas across the continent cost efficiently. Recent successes have included new locations in Dublin, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, Lyon, and Düsseldorf. Building on the early success of this program, IKON expects to add locations in 12 additional cities by 2007. The second part of the growth plan is the Pan European Strategy, analogous to the National Account Program in North America. Here, IKON is using its size and breadth of offerings to vie for large, multinational accounts. In this case, the customers are global companies, meaning not only that each win is significant, but also that each holds the potential for expansion into U.S. locations.