While overall shipments of hardcopy peripherals decrease 12.4 percent in 1Q13, shipments of high-yield inkjets increases 15.7 percent year-on-year.
IDC’s PRC Quarterly Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker showed an overall decline in China’s hardcopy peripherals market during the first quarter of the year, with 2.74 million units shipped, corresponding with a decline in revenue of 5.8 percent.
However, there was a strong growth in shipments of high-yield cartridge products, with around 90,000 units shipped during the quarter, despite the overall shipment of inkjet printers in China declining 32 percent year-on-year due to the economic downturn. The downturn has affected many home users and SMBs that favour inkjet products and caused inkjet printer vendors to pay more attention to profit indicators, adjust product strategy to control sales volume of low-end inkjet printers, and promote high-yield cartridge inkjet printers. IDC stated that the high-yield cartridge product segment accounts for 14.5 percent of China’s overall inkjet market.
Laser printer upgrades also accelerated, although overall shipments of laser printers saw a slight year-on-year decrease of 2.4 percent, reaching 1.55 million units. The number of single-function printers is seeing a gradual decline, and accounted for just 41.9 percent of China’s laser printer market as vendors shift focus to MFPs. Meanwhile, shipments of medium and high-speed mono laser printers increased 25.1 percent and 20.8 percent year-on-year, with mono laser products offering speeds of over 21 pages per minute making up 41 percent of the laser printer market.
IDC reported in turn that China’s serial dot matrix (SDM) printer market is expected to maintain market size during the next few years, despite overall shipment falling to 570,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 10.5 percent. While IDC acknowledges that the completion of the rural medical care cooperative project and national tax reform projects last year will cause the SDM printer market to have “limited procurement”, it predicts that the “successive transformation from business to added-value tax in all provinces and cities, and updated equipments procurement by all state-owned banks in Q2 2013” will help the market to maintain its size.
Antonio Wang, Associate Director of Computing Systems Research at IDC China, commented: “China’s macroeconomic environment remained unfavourable in Q1 2013, and the GDP growth rate of 7.7 percent was lower than expected. Policies on domestic demand stimulation and investment projects were also delayed, leading to large-scale industry procurements in the hardcopy peripherals market coming to a standstill. IDC expects China’s hardcopy peripherals market to pick up again as the economy recovers, government projects are successively launched, and major vendors actively promote products.”
Donna Wang, Senior Market Analyst for China’s Hardcopy Peripherals Market research at IDC China, added: “With the tweaking of product lines by major vendors, further expansion of channel structure and refinement of user positioning, IDC expects China’s hardcopy peripherals market to see tremendous growth opportunities in the future.”