The peripheral market has performed poorly over the last few years (see my Figure abovee) as physical processes have been replaced by digital ones. The area covers many different products and services, of which printers (both laser and ink jet) predominate. Nevertheless it also includes a number of products which can help us during the pandemic, such as web cams and 3D printers. Let’s look at how the market developed in 2019.
In a way analogous to cloud services taking revenues from data base enterprise product sales, printer suppliers diversified a few years by offering printing and other document services and by trying to force their customers only to use their own proprietary ink cartridges and laser engines through making it harder for third party suppliers to provide compatible (and cheaper) alternatives. In part the steeper decline in the peripheral market in EMEA is due to the EU making it legal to use non-proprietary refills.
The decline in spending in the Americas and EMEA have not been almost continuous since 2011, while in Asia Pacific there was a recovery in 2016 (see my Figure above). One reason for this discrepancy is that many printer suppliers are Japanese; they have been able to stress the regional importance of their products in a similar way to that American suppliers have made PCs more important in their region; another, that the complexity of many Asian languages have slowed the move to paperless processes.
The peripherals market was headed up by Canon in 2019 (see my Figure above that shows how the total $245b spending was split in terms of market share, region and type). It manufactures ink jet and laser printers as well as a full range of digital cameras as well as offering a wide range of services. HP Inc. was in a strong second position with a similar set of offerings minus cameras. The next seven suppliers (Ricoh, Epson, NEC, Kyocera, Hitachi, Konica Minolta, Brother) were Japanese.
During the current world crisis I expect an upturn in web cams (made by Logitech and others), as well as innovative use of 3D printers to make face masks and other useful artifacts. Those of us who work from home will make more use of the printers we have there.