Sharp
The BP era, under new management
SHARP
Sharp entered the nineties as the value-engineering house of the trade — small, cheap, cartridge-fed boxes that sold on price rather than pedigree. Three decades, one near-collapse and one Taiwanese buyer later, the copier line is still doing more or less what it always did. It has simply added a sixth toner station, coloured pink.
Sharp’s office-equipment arm survived its parent company’s worst decade almost by accident. The real money had moved into LCD panels, and when that bet went catastrophically wrong it dragged the whole conglomerate down with it — ending, in August 2016, with Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) completing a deal for roughly two-thirds of Sharp, price renegotiated down from an initial ¥700 billion offer to around US$3.5 billion once undisclosed liabilities came to light. It remains the largest foreign acquisition of a Japanese electronics firm on record. The copier business barely noticed from the outside: same name, same model numbers, a decade of quiet consolidation rather than asset-stripping.
What did change was the badge, eventually. Sharp’s “MX” nameplate had carried the A3 range since the 2000s; in May 2022 twenty-two new “BP” (Business Pro) models replaced it across the board. That should have ended the story. It did not — high-speed colour pairs kept shipping under MX numbers for years after, and it took until June 2026, with BP-80C80/BP-80C70 launched as named successors to the MX-8081/MX-7081, to close out one of the last corners where the old nameplate was still doing frontline work.
The more interesting change under Foxconn was ambition, not badging. September 2023 brought the BP-90C Pro Series, aimed at central reprographics rather than the front office — 13,500-sheet capacity, optional Fiery servers. Then, from April 2024, the BP-1200C/BP-1200S digital presses put Sharp into six-colour light-production printing for the first time, with a dedicated bright-pink toner station matching roughly ninety per cent of the Pantone library — the sort of trick that used to belong to Xerox iGen or HP Indigo, not a company built on cheap desktop boxes.
By 2025–26 the office-side handover was complete too: next-generation colour BP-71C/61C/51C in October 2025, mono BP-71M/51M from January 2026, both built around Entra ID single sign-on and roughly half-recycled-plastic chassis — a company still iterating on its core product on a normal cycle, Taiwanese ownership or not.
Sharp — The Range, 2026
| Model | Year | PPM | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| BP-71C65 | 2025 | 65 | Flagship of the Oct-2025 refresh; Entra ID SSO, ~50% recycled plastic |
| BP-71C31 | 2025 | 31 | Entry point of the Advanced tier, same refresh |
| BP-61C45 | 2025 | 45 | Successor to BP-60C45; regional launch date unverified |
| BP-51C55 | 2025 | 55 | Essential tier; Print Release from up to 100 devices |
| BP-22C25 | 2025 | 25 | Smallest current A3 colour MFP; 7″ touchscreen |
| BP-80C80 | 2026 | 80 | Named successor to MX-8081 — closes the MX-to-BP handover |
| BP-90C80 | 2023 | 80 | Pro Series; 13,500-sheet capacity, Fiery servers optional |
| BP-1200S | 2024 | 120 (Letter) | 6-colour digital press; 6th station bright pink, 90% Pantone match |
| BP-1200C | 2024 | unverified | 4-colour sibling of the 1200S, shared platform |
| BP-71M65 | 2026 | 65 | Mono half of the Jan-2026 next-gen refresh |
| MX-M1206 | unverified | 120 | Still MX-badged in 2026; twin-engine light-production family |
| BP-C131WD | unverified | 31 | A4 desktop; 410×410mm footprint, ~50% recycled plastic |
| MX-M6070 | unverified | unverified | Shares BP-range UI language — brochure only |
The slowest rebrand in the register
Sharp announced the death of “MX” — Multifunction eXtension, the nameplate that had carried its A3 line since the 2000s — in May 2022, with twenty-two new BP-series models replacing it wholesale. Four years is a long time for a rebrand to keep finding stragglers. The high-speed departmental colour pair that finally retired the last visible MX numbers, BP-80C80 and BP-80C70, did not ship until June 2026, explicitly named as successors to the MX-8081/MX-7081 it was quietly still competing against. Even now the closure is more marketing department than warehouse: the mono production twins MX-M1206/MX-M1056 remain current-catalogue items, and at least four office-mono models — MX-M6070, M5070, M4070, M3071 — still turn up in Sharp’s own dealer literature, seen in brochure only, sharing the current BP range’s UI language without ever having been given its badge. The rebrand finished on the day someone in Rochester decided to say so. The paperwork disagrees.
The pink toner gambit
Light-production print was never Sharp’s room. That belonged to Canon, Ricoh and Xerox, companies with decades of reprographics pedigree and, in Xerox’s case, the actual invention credit for the industry. The BP-90C Pro Series of September 2023 was the opening move — a 13,500-sheet-capacity pairing built for central reprographics departments rather than front offices, with optional Fiery print servers bolted on for anyone who wanted real production-workflow control. The BP-1200C/BP-1200S digital presses that followed in April 2024 were the actual land-grab: a six-colour engine, 2,400×2,400 dpi, and a dedicated bright-pink sixth toner station specifically engineered to reach roughly ninety per cent of the Pantone spot-colour library without special mixing. It is the sort of capability line that used to separate the production-print specialists from the office-copier crowd, and Sharp built it four years into Foxconn’s ownership — hard evidence, for a change, that the new parent company was funding something more ambitious than a badge swap.
THE VERDICT — SHARP
Foxconn bought the company and mostly left the copier line to get on with it; the copier line spent the decade quietly becoming a pink-inked production press while the brochures kept selling MX to whoever hadn’t noticed.