The market for IT peripherals covers printers, supplies, digital cameras, mice, replacement keyboards and like products. It is dominated by printer suppliers who own the patents, manufacturing capabilities and patience to build financially-sustainable models in which consumers and enterprises purchase an initial product and then spend incrementally on supplies – such as paper, printer and toner cartridges – to keep them running. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed the printer market dramatically – office employees working from home have little need for print-outs. Although it was also a boon for suppliers of PC add-ons (keyboards, mice, mobile speakers, etc.) such as Logitech, the market has seen a multi-year decline. In this post I’ll look at whether (and how) peripherals vendors can create a positive market momentum in the coming years. 
In 2022 the peripherals market declined by 6.9% in spending to $246 billion; this follows a growth of 6.0% in 2021. It is one of only a few IT markets led by Asia Pacific on a regional level (see my Figure above, where the dotted line for EMEA and Asia Pacific shows a 2005 constant dollar view of vlaues based on the exchange rates of the Euro and Chinese Yuan Renimbi respectively). Sales there shrank by 9.5% in constant dollar calculations (-5.7% in current). EMEA sales grew in constant dollars by 3.9%, but were down 7.6% on current dollar rates. Sales in the Americas dropped by 2.5% in the year. The worldwide market has been declining for most of the last 17 years and made worse by the credit crunch in 2008-9 and the pandemic as discussed.
The 2022 market was woth $246 billion and can be segmented by a number of dimensions. For instance:
- In offerings the largest component was ‘peripheral services’ – such as production print, hardware maintenance – which made up almost half of the total spend. Supplies (paper, toner and printer cartridges, memory cards, etc.) accounted for 20.0%, printers for 14.3% and digital cameras, 7.1%. The remaining spending was on ‘other hardware’.
- Regionally Asia Pacific accounted for 42.2% of spending, the Americas 30.9% and EMEA, 26.9%.
- As for suppliers, Canon was by far the largest revenues in revenues with a 22.0% share. HP Inc. was in second poisition with 15%. These two were followed by anumber of (mainly Japanese) vendors, the largest of which was Epson, whose reveues were less than a third of Canon’s and less than a half of HP’s.
In the rest of this post I’ll look at the printer market in terms of unit shipments.
HP was leader of the printer market in 2022, holding a 19.9% share of the $35 billion hardware market. It slipped slightly from it position in 2021, when it held a 20.7% of the $38 billion market. Its share in unit shipments was 20.0% (see my Figure above). Canon was a close second with a share of 17.7%. It was followed by Brother (11.4%), Epson (9.7%), Kyocera (7.2%), NEC (4.8%) and Toshiba (4.2%). these are all Japanese companies apart from HP, whose printer business is run from Japan. The printer business depends largely on designing and selling enough machines to establish an economically sustainable installed base, protecting the toner and ink cartridge replacement market, building production print services and serving customers. This involves recruiting many channel partners, espeicially for addressing the – typically ink jet – consumer market. In the EU there is legislation to allow compatible ink and toner cartridges to be soldby non-printer manufacturers; although constant changes in design in how the cartridges fit and operate make this a difficult market for third parties to succeed in. Like the gaming console market, there are major barriers for new players to enter, or for established players to exit.
In total 134 million were sold worldwide in 2022 – significantly down on the 180 million sold in 2003… and even more so on the 188 million sold in the peak year of 2014 (see my Figure above for annual shipments of laser and ink jet printers). The decline in ink jet sales was substantially less than in laser printers, due mainly to the customers who buy them; buying laser printers, typically installed in offices, had a much lower priority for businesses during the pandemic, when many employees worked from home. Shipments of laser printers grew in 2022 slightly, but the 53 million units were still way below the 83 million sold in 2019.
Unit shipment market shares for 2022 differed by continent (see my Figure above). HP Inc. led in the Americas and EMEA and was in second position in Asia Pacific, where Canon was the leader. These regional shifts in supplier success are important, but don’t mask the fact that the printer market is a global one – I can find no single-region – let alone single-country vendors in this market.
So if the total peripherals market has declined, partially due to the pandemic, what can supplier do to revitalize their businesses? Solid 3D printing is one way, although most of the vendors supplying them remain specialist and small in 2022; another is to focus on efficiency to increase and measure success not in sales revenues, but net profit and profitability. Overall I am not confident that this market will grow in 2023, although I suspect it won’t fall as far as the PC market, which I reviewed last week.
Please let me know if this type of analysis is useful to you and whether you would like to see more details of ITCandor’s work in this area.