JAPAN PRINTER MARKET DOWN 1.1% IN 2004

[Anonymous]

 

Japan printer market
down 1.1 pct in 2004

TOKYO, March 05 – Japan’s printer market shrank last year
and is unlikely to rebound strongly in 2005 as demand for ink jet models
stagnates and corporations use copiers to satisfy their printing needs, a
research firm said on Wednesday.

Japan said sales of printers, including ink jet and
business-use models, dropped 1.1 percent from a year earlier to 7.816 million
units in 2004, while sales in value terms fell 1.5 percent to 355.3 billion yen
($3.4 billion).

Driving the
Japanese market’s decline was a 2.4 percent drop in unit sales of ink jet
printers, which are typically used by consumers to print maps and other
documents from their PC and account for over 80 percent of all printers sold in
Japan.

Laser and light-emitting
diode (LED) printers, which tend to be used in offices, make up nearly all of
the remaining printers.

Canon
Inc. outmanoeuvred Seiko Epson Corp.  to secure 44 percent of the domestic ink
jet market in 2004, grabbing the top spot from its rival for the first time in
eight years. Seiko Epson held 41 percent of the market in unit terms.

Gartner
Japan analyst Tomoko Mitani attributed Canon’s success to its aggressive
promotion of a new line of printers that are black and box-shaped, giving them a
sleek appearance compared with conventional printer designs.

She said
competition was set to get tougher and predicted the ink jet market would be
about flat in 2005.

“There
are people making purchases (of ink jet models) for the first time but much of
the market comes from replacement demand,” Mitani said. “The market has pretty
much matured and we are unlikely to see significant growth from here.”

Mitani
added that competitors such as Hewlett-Packard , Lexmark International
and Dell Inc. would struggle to break Canon’s and Seiko Epson’s
virtual duopoly given their strong brands and sales channels in Japan.

Among ink
jet printers, sales of single-function models fell 17.8 percent last year to
4.29 million units as consumers continued to opt for multi-function models,
which can do other things besides printing such as copying and scanning.

Sales of
multi-function printers, on the other hand, jumped 54.6 percent to 2.18 million
units last year, accounting for 34 percent of the ink jet total, up from 21
percent in 2003.

Sales of
laser and LED printers rose 0.1 percent to 1.064 million, with a 24 percent jump
in sales of colour models offsetting a 5.3 percent decline in black-and-white
machines.

Gartner
said falling prices of colour laser printers were boosting demand but warned
that rising sales of multi-function digital copiers that can also print would
likely dent demand for business-use printers in 2005 in
Japan

[Author]

March 3, 2005 at 10:12 AM