The market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is expected to be worth $40 billion (€37 billion) by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.7 percent.
Labels and Labelling reported on the research from Smithers Pira, which found that the market “offers dynamic and exciting opportunities”, and the report – The future of printing in the Middle East and North Africa to 2022 – found that “the region as a whole is set to expand” from a value of $26.8 billion (€25.3 billion) in 2017 to $40 billion in 2022, with a CAGR of 8.7 percent. This is an expansion from the “mean annual growth” figure of 2.4 percent registered between 2012 and 2017.
The site added that this growth reflects “the opening of until now underdeveloped countries to the full range of modern print products and technologies”, and the analysts noted in turn that the expansion is “occurring against a more static backdrop for the print industry generally”, with annual growth globally “pegged at a more sober two percent as traditional segments decline”.
Due to these findings, the company states that the market in the region “offers dynamic and exciting opportunities”, and “can be seen as an attractive strategic growth target for international print equipment and consumable suppliers”. The region however is “not divorced from wider print technology trends”, with digital output in terms of inkjet and toner “set to rise at the fastest rate”, overall output rising from 2.61 trillion A4 sheets in 2017 to 2.76 trillion in 2022.
This is a “more modest” 2.8 percent annual growth but “emphasises the value-adding potential and higher per unit” price that providers “will be able to realise”.
Stephen Hill, Smithers Pira’s EMEA Operations Director, said: “The drop off in demand for high volume print products – like books and newspapers – in core European and North America markets, means the print industry needs to find new markets. And from a number of perspectives MENA is very attractive for this. We are seeing global print firms opening new offices and reporting sales to the region, and local print service providers diversifying their product offering as they rapidly adopt new technologies.
“Of course, selling effectively into MENA has some unique challenges but our research shows the demand is and will be there; and there are specific opportunities now, like the opening up of the post-sanctions Iranian market, and transition economies moving towards food sold in supermarkets in locally printed packaging.”