Konica Minolta Signs Research Collaboration Agreement with Singaporean I2R, Accelerating Business Development in New Areas

Tokyo (July 17, 2014) - Konica Minolta, Inc. (Konica Minolta) is pleased to announce that its Business Innovation Center (BIC) Asia Pacific has signed a Research Collaboration Agreement with A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R^*1)^*2.

In its new medium term business plan “TRANSFORM 2016,” Konica Minolta aims to achieve transformation in the Group's broad range of businesses through completely customer-centric ideas and actions and become a corporation that can deliver highly value-added solutions.

On February 20, 2014, the company established the BIC in Singapore to strongly drive transformation to services business. In alliance with Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the BIC has launched locally optimized business incubations in various areas.

Toward further enhancement of business incubation activities more dynamically with speed and urgency, the BIC has signed a Research Collaboration Agreement with I2R that has been conducting researches in network, system security, voice recognition and wireless communications, among others. Based on the agreement, the BIC and I2R have launched collaborative activities for business development in new areas.

The signing ceremony was attended by representatives of I2R and opinion leaders from EDB and the National University of Singapore. Konica Minolta took the opportunity to showcase initiatives embracing both business technologies and healthcare businesses in the field of healthcare monitoring, an emerging technology with increasing social interest. Several programs by the BIC were also presented to demonstrate its vast interest in exploring new business areas and developing new products and services beyond traditional business sectors. Those efforts will be helpful in strengthening alliance with governmental agencies in Singapore in the future.

In addition to the initiatives in Singapore, Konica Minolta will continue to showcase its latest programs at its BICs in other four regions (North America, Europe, China^*3 and Japan) and proactively keep up external communications so that the business and academic communities will understand that the BICs are strongly focused on realizing true needs of the customers. Through the activities, the BICs will be cooperating with supporting partner companies and aiming to turn the innovations into businesses with speediness.