Fujifilm Holdings Corp. will enter the online photo-book publishing business in August as the traditional camera-film market continues to shrink.
"We are aiming for ¥10 billion sales from the photo-book service" in the fiscal year ending in March 2011, said Yoshikazu Aoki, a corporate vice president at Fujifilm.
Fujifilm, the world's biggest maker of liquid-crystal display film, began expanding into new businesses, such as chemical materials and ultrasound mammography, in 2005 as the growing popularity of digital cameras began eating into revenue from its photo-film operations.
From August the Tokyo-based company will print digital photos stored on servers into a printed book format on demand, Aoki said in an interview at Fujifilm's head office in Tokyo last week.
An English-language version of the service aimed at customers in the United States will start in May, he said.
Worldwide sales for such services will grow to ¥80 billion in 2011 from ¥29 billion in the 12 months to Dec. 31, 2007, according to U.S.-based researcher Photographic Consultants Ltd.
Fujifilm last month bought IP Labs, a German photo processing software developer, to expand its online photo business in Europe. Fujifilm paid "several billion yen" to acquire the company, Aoki said without elaborating. The investment will be recovered by fiscal 2010 as Fujifilm expands the business, he said.
Global photo-film demand has plunged 75 percent in 2007 from its peak in 2000, according to Aoki. Fujifilm's photo-film business accounted for 4 percent of ¥2.78 trillion in group sales in the year to March 2007, compared with 19 percent in fiscal 2000.
"We will keep the photo-related business profitable by expanding into new businesses and cutting costs," Aoki said.
Fujifilm expects to meet its sales target of 8 million digital cameras in the year to March 31, up 21 percent.