The peripheral market is a mixture of hardware, service and supplies. Over the last few years it has shown a decline, mainly due to the improvement in screen resolution and online applications reducing the age-old need to print out documents and photographs. It recovered slightly in 2017, growing 3% to $247 billion; although this total was $68 billion short of the record total in 2010. The regional bias in terms of spending is towards Asia Pacific (see Figure) rather than the Americas, which is a growing feature of the PC market.
The vendor, regional and offering market shares for the 2017 peripheral market is shown in this Figure. Canon is by far the strongest vendor, generating a 25.9% share in the year – significantly ahead of HP Inc.’s 16.5%, which has been more successful in the PC than printer market since splitting off from HPE. Asia Pacific accounted for 42.6% of spending in the year, the Americas 30.7% and EMEA just 26.7%. Peripheral (mainly document and print) services accounted for 49.0% of spending in the year and supplies (cartridges, photographic paper, etc.) made up 21.7%. Printers (laser and ink jet combined) accounted for just 14.9% of spending, digital cameras were 7.9% and other peripheral hardware (mice, pointers, etc.) were 6.5%
As for the future – solid 3D printing is growing rapidly, but will not replace the lost billions in sales. More positively however is the rise of digitisation and the Internet of Things (IoT); almost All computer peripherals have some kind of sensor or processing built in (even printer cartridges!) – I expect a strong rise in spending on IoT devices for central heating, climate and other monitoring and control systems will do more to close the gap, even if the majority of new computing added to consumer machines and appliances take them well beyond the definition of a computer peripheral. We’ve reached a point in the development of the IT industry when computerisation is no longer special or distinguishable in our everyday lives. I’m also sizing the overall IoT market by looking at the sales of customised and embedded processors.