It has to do with pricing and pricing politics.

They can not sell very expensive toner/cartridges in a developing country, or a country with low prices/wages in general. So toner and cartridges cost less, then in a high cost country. T
o make sure you put the right toner in your machine - they add a chip of some kind that tells the printer where it's intended to be used.
It will not work anywhere else.

If you live in a high cost country - you are not suppost to be able to buy cheap toner from a low cost country.
So we end up with a situastion where a set of toner, a fuser and a transfer belt cost 10 times the price of a new one. So we scrap a whole lot of fully functional printers/copiers. A fuser for a Ricoh SPC232 cost more then twice as much as a new printer. So what do you do? You keep the toner and maybe the transferbelt from the used model and scrap the rest. Buy a new machine and use the parts in that machine.

Then you watch the web ads on how concerned the copier manufacturer is about the environment. It gives me mixed emotions.. pissed off is the most common.

It's like if you buy a new car and need new tires and an oil change. Sorry, that will cost twice as much as a new car.

They add the chips to the cartridge so it will be harder for companies to make cheap non brand toner, and to prevent other users to buy it cheap from another country.
You'll notice on the Ricoh MPC2500 you can not take out a tonerbottle that is full, add another and then insert the new (full) tonerbottle you used just 2 minutes ago. It's probably to prevent people from filling them up with toners made by other suppliers.

Anyway..the toner in Europe, Asia and America is the same - but the bottles (physical) or chip is different. Money talk.