Sluggish start to year for western Europe print

Hardcopy tracker reveals especially sharp decline in sales of printing devices to consumers

IDC figures have confirmed a sluggish beginning to printer sales in 2012, with Q1 volumes in western Europe falling 12.1 per cent to 5.8m shipments.

Phil Sargeant, programme director for hardcopy market research at IDC, said last year saw 6.6m printers shipped. Quarterly revenues were down 5.3 per cent year on year to $2.9bn, with prices continuing to fall.

"Demand from both the consumer and business markets remains subdued. Political and economic climates in many countries continue to be unstable and GDP estimates for growth in 2012 are either minimal or expected toward the later stages of 2012," he said.

In Q1, consumer inkjet sales collapsed 16.6 per cent, and the combined business markets 5.1 per cent – despite strong growth in business inkjet shipments. Colour laser products are now a third of all laser shipments, although business inkjets accounted for one in five of the combined laser and business inkjet market.

Arnaud Gagneux, director of the western European imaging hardware and document solutions group at IDC, added: "Manufacturers and their channel partners are facing some dilemmas in 2012."

Many customers want printing to be cheaper but still demand better productivity and workflow, Gagneux said.

"But in general, vendors still need to push hardware into the office environments to make their business models work, and finding the right balance between the two is a key issue," he said.

The UK remained the second-largest western Europe market, buying 1.06 million printing devices. This represented a decline of 6.7 per cent, with only business inkjet sales expanding, by 28.4 per cent in the quarter. Colour laser shipments to the UK remained flat, while monochrome laser sales fell 16.9 per cent.

However, in the UK, serial impact dot matrix printers grew 17.9 per cent in the quarter. Fast inkjet devices also expanded sales slightly.

The figures are from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker for May 2012. It tracks sales of A2-A4 devices, including single-function devices, MFPs, and single-function digital copiers.