APEJ Consumable Revenue Enjoys Year-on-year Growth

Printer consumable market in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region increased 4% year-on-year (YOY) to US$1,729.65 million in the fourth quarter in 2014, reported IDC.

According to the research data, the printer consumable market in the region experienced 0.5% continuous decrease. Third party brands account for around 23% of the total value in the market, contributing about US$392 million.

The laser toner market marked growth in revenue. IDC said the growth “is driven by third party vendors”. As OEMs are focusing more on this market, the growing shipment of printers has driven the increase of the installed base of printers in the region. However, SMBs and SOHOs still prefer economic third party products rather than high priced OEM toners. As a result, the growing installed base didn’t help OEMs gain more in consumables in APEJ.

Further, IDC predicts that “laser toner market will witness intense competition between OEM and third party products”. Despite losing share in total unit shipment, OEM are still holding 60% of share in revenue. Third party vendors aim to grow their revenue by releasing high-end toners and high speed printers. Also, they changed better packaging of their products and now target developed market and commercial enterprises which value product quality.

The shipment and revenue of ink cartridges of the market in the APEJ is declining. “Looking at the inkjet space, OEM vendors have launched inkjet hardcopy peripherals (HCPs) which offer more page yield at low cost of print per page (CPP),” noted Pankaj Chawla, Research Manager for IPDS Research at IDC Asia/Pacific. “This strategy has helped OEM vendors as low priced original ink made third party ink products a less attractive option. As a result, the overall shipment and share of third party products has declined. However, this strategy has also affected ink revenue of OEM vendors as high yield ink cartridges are economic as compare to standard cartridges.”