The rights to the Pentax trademark now belong to Ricoh Imaging:
From 1 October 2011, the date on which Hoya sold Pentax’s imaging business to Ricoh, until recently, searches of various trademark databases (WIPO for the world, EUIPO for the European Union, USPTO for the United States, etc.) showed that Hoya held the rights to the Pentax trademark in both the medical and photographic sectors, even though the latter business had been sold to Ricoh.
Therefore, Ricoh Imaging was using the Pentax trademark with Hoya’s permission, i.e. under a brand licence agreement.
However, the same search of the same databases now returns a different result: Ricoh Imaging now holds the rights to the Pentax trademark in the photographic sector. In other words, Hoya has transferred these rights to Ricoh Imaging.
This transfer is recent. For example, the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt, DPMA) received two notifications of transfer on 23 September 2025: one for the original registration from the 1950s, and one for a supplementary registration from 1990.
Source: Mistral75
