TechRadar believes the Chinese manufacturer might consider a global printer launch in 2016.
The site has warned OEMs including HP to “watch out”, as printers “could be Lenovo’s next big thing”, having already launched printers in the Chinese market in August 2013, which TechRadar stated was a “low-key announcement” that “barely registered on western technology websites”.
Noting that this was “unlike other Lenovo announcements”, and that “you can’t even find a review of one of them online”, the site believes however that news of the launch “must have reached HP and other vendors months before” due to them being manufactured by the Kinpo Group, whose production lines “churn out half of the printers sold globally”, and believes there is a chance the Chinese company might expand to worldwide sales.
However, it reflected that the global printing market “is tricky”, using the example of Seine Technology’s Pantum printer, which had “big global ambitions in the printer market” after “having done particularly well in the highly-lucrative consumables arena”. Lenovo’s sister company Legend Capital acquired 15 percent of Seine in a “clear indication of the validity of its business model” before the launch of the Pantum brand in 2012 worldwide “having captured five percent of the Chinese market in 2011”.
The Pantum however saw “disappointing” sales, in Europe particularly, and TechRadar notes that the company earned the “unenviable British record of the cheapest brand new laser printer on the market as the channel got rid of remaining stocks”, with some machines “literally being given away when purchasing five reams of A4 paper”.
The site went on to state that the outcome “is likely to be different for Lenovo” if it is “willing to invest in the channel and take some calculated risks” in printer manufacturing, because “unlike Pantum, it is not an unknown brand”, which gives it a “lot of goodwill value and a lot of powerful relationships across the channel”, whilst adding another product line “will not require as much effort as Pantum’s failed endeavour”.
Pointing out the company “needs to find another long term engine of growth” after mobile phones and computers, TechRadar uses the example of how much money HP earned from printers in the last quarter – with $5.59 billion (€4.3 billion). With the world “printing more than ever before”, the site believes that 2016 “might be the year when […] Lenovo finally goes global with its printer range”.