Printer market shows steady growth
But lacklustre home photo printer sales drag down inkjet share
Sales
of laser printers grew 8.2 per cent in the second quarter, as vendors
cut prices and introduced higher performance products, according to
market analysts. However inkjet sales rose only 3.7 per cent year on
year.”The [inkjet] market was dragged down in particular by weak sales
of small photo printers in the US and Europe,” said Tetsuya Wadaki, an
analyst at Nomura Securities’ Financial & Economic Research Center
in Tokyo.Small-format home photo printers designed specifically to
print digital camera snapshots are losing out to high-street photo
printing services, according to new research.”A string of makers have
decided to withdraw from, or drastically scale back, their small photo
printer operations because competition from photographic print stores
and online printers has made them uncompetitive on price,” said
Wadaki.In addition, A4-sized consumer inkjet printers now have the
resolution and performance to handle simple photo printing, further
discouraging ordinary users from buying a separate photo printer.HP
continues to lead the market, but Japanese rival Canon has seen
“substantial” growth in sales of consumables and other non-hardware
products, according to Nomura.Normura’s analysts also believe that the
printer market could be in for some substantial changes driven by
pressure from HP.”[HP] is looking to advance and refine inkjet
technology in order to compete with the laser printer and copier
market, and other inkjet printers are increasingly carrying out similar
experiments,” said Wadaki.