Western Europe HCP Market: Shipments Down Yet Over Expectations

Western Europe HCP Market: Shipments Down Yet Over Expectations
Fotolia

According to IDC, the Western European printer and multifunction peripheral (MFP) market decreased by 1.6% in unit terms in 1Q18 compared with the same period a year ago.

This is a smaller decline than was originally forecast and for some OEMs the quarter was a rather productive start to the year with many reporting year on year increases. The market decline was less than 100K and most of this contraction was from monochrome lasers rather than consumer inkjets.

This led to the overall laser markets declining by 3.6%, but on a positive note the color laser markets continued to increase by 1.1%, with gains in both the A4 and A3 MFP markets. The drive towards color is continuing and IDC forecasts that the decline in monochrome will also continue.

Inkjet markets remained relatively flat and only showed a small decline of 0.6%. As expected, the consumer markets continue to suffer, but remain quite sizeable, while but the business inkjet market showed strong growth of 10.0% year on year. This growth occurred in most segments as both printers and MFP products increased and although most growth was found in the A4 markets the A3 markets for printers and MFP devices continued to grow.

Production markets had mixed results and although laser markets were down the high-speed inkjet market increased by 17.6%, which can lead to large revenue streams for the OEMs. Serial impact dot matrix also continued to slide as customers for these products migrate towards laser or inkjet devices.

Germany, the largest market in Western Europe, declined by 1.8%. The market amounted to 1.2m units and generally the market shipments were in line with the European averages. Shipments in France showed an increase of 1.2%. Its shipments figure of 927K confirmed that France is the second largest market in Western Europe. Overall shipments in the U.K. declined by 1.6% in Q118 as both inkjet and laser shipments declined. The U.K. recorded a shipment figure of 805K.