Hard road ahead for hardcopy vendors

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 02 February 2012 04:42

IT Industry - Market

The boom in Internet-enabled mobile devices (IEMDs) is reshaping the European printing industry, offering new challenges and opportunities for hardcopy vendors, with analysts predicting a slow decline in future demand in print volumes for the traditional hardcopy vendors.

In its latest report on the print market, analyst firm IDC says that, after a flat trend in 2010, it now expects home and office print volumes in Western Europe to slow down even further, declining at a CAGR of 0.6 percent from 2011 through to 2015. IDC says the increasing popularity of IEMDs will contribute to this slow decline.

"New Internet-enabled mobile devices change the nature of users' relationship with documents," said Arnaud Gagneux, director, Imaging Hardcopy and Document Solutions, Western Europe for IDC. "This affects both consumers and businesses, and offers hardcopy vendors opportunities for growth in security, document solutions, and managed print services, to name a few."

IDC reports that roughly 95 million smartphones are expected to be sold in 2011, up more than 220% year on year, and that this massive uptake has already drastically changed the way users consult certain documents, reducing the need for printouts.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg, according to IDC, and the firm pr edicts that in the enterprise sector, the increasingly mobile workforce will create huge demand for IEMDs in the years to come, “ignited by the global process of digitisation and consumerisation of IT.”

The IDC study makes the point that media tablets will make their entrance in key vertical markets with dramatic consequences for document workflows, and as a result it will be crucial for vendors to have a mobile and cloud printing solution strategy in place.

"With information increasingly available in digital format at users' fingertips, the entire hardcopy industry faces a real challenge," said Mario Lombardo, senior analyst for imaging hardware devices at IDC. "The boom in IEMDs, combined with the growth in cloud storage and digitisation, is already set to change the rules of the game in the printing industry."

But IDC suggests it is not all doom and gloom for the hardcopy industry, and that the growth in digital content will continue to create many opportunities in the document solutions area. “There will continue to be significant opportunities for print in select verticals, due to hardcopy document compliance and the use of business applications for which paper documents are still preferred,” Lombardo says.

IDC also observed that the production printing space will also be greatly impacted by the digital revolution, and that with ereaders expected to generate a CAGR of 23.7 percent between 2011 and 2015, demand for ebooks will be high. Though this will negatively impact the analogue printing market, demand for short runs will increase, favouring digital production printing, IDC concludes.