Canon, Epson and HP leaders in declining HCP market

The worldwide hardcopy peripherals (HCP) market experienced a small decline in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker.

IDC announced total unit shipments declined by -2.5% year over year to $25.8 million, while the corresponding shipment value fell by -1.2% over the same period.

Despite these small declines, IDC identified the following positive accomplishments in this large market during the first quarter of the year:

• Colour laser products grew 2% year over year.
• The Asia/Pacific region experienced a 9.8% expansion in the laser segment due to government purchasing and vendors aggressively pushing shipments into sales channels.
• Canon, Epson, and HP all enjoyed pockets of growth in certain regions, with Epson experiencing its most positive growth in the USA and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan).

Key market transitions:

Inkjet still makes up the majority of the market, but the best market growth is in certain laser segments. Specifically, colour laser shipments grew 2.0% in 1Q15 to 2.0 million units.

Single function to multifunction:  The total single function printer market declined -8.0% year over year in the first quarter, and total multifunction peripheral (MFP) shipments decreased by -0.3%.

However, MFPs showed strong performance in all colour laser speed ranges, especially in 31-44ppm, growing 19.9% year over year.

Monochrome to Colour: Colour increased its overall share 0.8% from a year ago to 20.8% share versus its monochrome counterparts.

Colour's year-over-year growth was 2.0% while monochrome laser declined by -3.1%.

The strongest colour speed segment was the 11-20 ppm (30.2% share), where HP did particularly well with the Colour LaserJet Pro M476 MFP model family.

Move to faster speed segments accelerates:  The 45-69 ppm monochrome laser MFP segment exhibited the strongest year-over-year growth in 1Q15 at 31.0%, followed by 45-69 ppm printer segment (6.4%) and 31-44 ppm MFP (2.4%).

The mono laser 45-69 ppm segment's strong growth was fuelled by the HP LaserJet Enterprise M602 family.

In the colour market, the 70-90 ppm MFP segment did well at 49.6% year-over-year growth, followed by 31-44 ppm at 19.9% and 1-10 ppm at 18.2%.

The A3/A4 battle in the mid-speed market segments continues. A4 MFP devices gained penetration in the 31-69 ppm monochrome segment with a 74.1% share of the total monochrome A3/A4 MFP market in the same speed segment.

The 12.1% year-over-year growth of the A4 31-69 ppm MFP monochrome laser segment was driven by strong year-over-year results in the both A4 31-44 ppm (5.0% growth) and A4 45-69 ppm MFP segment (59.6% growth) with significant contributions from HP (29.2%) and Kyocera DS (24.5%).