The OEM reported increased revenue year-over-year but continued to see declines.
The 2Q2015 results included a year-over-year increase in revenue of six percent, from ¥246.2 billion ($1.9 billion/€1.8 billion) to ¥260.9 billion ($2 billion/€1.9 billion), but business profit fell year-over-year by 29.8 percent to ¥16.5 billion ($132 million/€121 million). The OEM’s printing solutions business saw a 12 percent growth in revenue to dominate the other segments, half of which saw marginal declines in revenue.
Printing solutions in the quarter saw revenue of ¥171.8 billion ($1.3 billion/€1.2 billion), which gave it the 12 percent year-over-year growth from last year’s ¥159.7 billion ($1.2 billion/€1.1 billion), but failed to match either the peak final quarter of the last financial year or the previous quarter. In 4Q2014, the unit generated ¥209.7 billion ($1.6 billion/€1.5 billion) of the OEM’s ¥301.9 billion ($2.4 billion/€2.2 billion) total revenue, while in 1Q2015 it generated ¥185 billion ($1.4 billion/€1.3 billion) of the total ¥271.5 billion ($2.1 billion/€1.9 billion). In turn, it saw a fall of 5.5 percent in business profit as a segment.
The segment’s total revenue saw printers provide ¥118.2 billion ($949 million/€868 million), a 10.4 percent increase on last year, while professional printing and other products provided the remainder. In the printers sub-segment, high-capacity ink tank printer volumes increased, while consumables sales remained “solid”, providing 77 percent of the sales, while serial dot-matrix sales volumes also grew, providing 12 percent of sales. In professional printing, wide-format machines also saw “solid” sales.
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Epson stated that there were a number of factors affecting business profit in the quarter, including a “decrease in printing solutions profit”, inkjet cartridge printer manufacturing “increas[ing]” and the “cost of products manufactured overseas” growing. For the whole financial year, and despite the “many elements of uncertainty in the global economy”, Epson has “not revised” its outlooks, but is “smoothly transitioning our businesses in line” with strategies agreed upon.
These include “expand[ing] sales of high-capacity ink tank printers”, “increas[ing] sales of consumables by improving the install base” and “steadily develop[ing] new business areas”. It predicts that printing solutions will see a 26.1 percent increase in revenue over the year to ¥757 billion ($6 billion/€5.5 billion), with printers growing 18.8 percent and professional printing growing 8.8 percent to revenues of ¥530 billon ($4.2 billion/€3.8 billion) and ¥208 billion ($1.6 billion/€1.5 billion) respectively. Inkjet is predicted to provide 79 percent of the revenue, while dot-matrix machines will provide 10 percent.