The market for computer peripherals in the year to the end of June it was worth $245b. My Figure above shows this spending broken in three dimensions. In particular:
- Offering – showing that between them services and supplies took 70%; as a mature market suppliers have found new ways of generating revenues and profits aside from the provision of printer, camera and other types of hardware product
- Supplier – demonstrating the joint lead held by Canon (24.2%) and HP Inc, (19.2%) and the five other major vendors
- Region – illustrating the bias of the market towards Asia Pacific, partially due to the more complex character fonts used in China, Japan and other Asia countries
Almost all leading suppliers are Japanese; even HP Inc. began its business there.
The market for computer peripherals has been in decline for a number of years. In the year to the end of June 2019 spending declined by 5.2% and in the quarter, by 3.4% to $59.7b. My chart above shows the spending trend by quarter for the market split four ways; of these supplies have fared best, while spending on printers, digital cameras and other hardware (such as teleconferencing equipment) has stabilised.
Printers are a vital element of the peripherals market. In the year to the end of June it was worth $38b with 159 million products shipped. In total the installed base of these stood at 596 million. HP Inc. led in terms of revenue (20.0%) and shipments (26.6%) – ahead of Canon, which made the largest number of printers installed.
As many newer IT product markets, such as PCs and mobile devices become mature, their suppliers could do worse than to learn from the printer suppliers about how to change their market strategies. In the printer market vendors have developed after-markets for supplies as well as ink and laser cartridges, protecting their intellectual property by making it hard for third party suppliers to address, even if in some regions, such as the European Union, it is illegal for them to prevent competition for replacement cartridges. They spend more than most IT hardware manufacturers on research and development, since improvements in resolution and accuracy can unlock important replacement activities and pioneer new product types such as 3D solid printing and large-scale commercial printing to replace the loss of revenues from business and consumer users, many of whom now live in a paperless world, choosing not to print documents out in the volumes they did in the past.
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