Printing consumables market in China post COVID-19

May 14, 2020

According to the latest research from IDC ’s “Annual Tracking Report on China ’s Printing Consumables Market”, China ’s overall printer consumable shipments reached 95.856 million in 2019.

Looking at the shipments, 252.739 million were inkjet cartridges and OEM cartridges were 111.9019 million, down 11.0% year-on-year in 2018. Ink bottles used in the continuous ink supply printers reached 6.347 million bottles, an increase of 16.7% year-on-year in 2018.

The data shows that the continuous supply product market is entering an upward trend, whereas inkjet cartridges shipments are declining, according to IDC.

IDC said that the COVID-19 pandemic that began in January 2020 has had a huge impact on many industries in China. For the home office market, which is dominated by inkjet products, inkjet products are “hot” because of the explosive printing demand for learning materials of various schools. In China, the price of machines and consumables in the inkjet channel has doubled, and some of them have become out of stock. This in turn has led to low-end laser printers gaining the favour of home users.

Whether it is a printer / copier manufacturer or a third-party consumables manufacturer, the continuous demand for consumables depends on the base of the number of hardware products. With the intensifying of the concept of printing management services (MPS) and the integration of printing and copying solutions in the industry, the concept of overall print volume has been paid more attention to by manufacturers, not just one-sided pursuit of the connection rate of consumables, according to IDC

The outbreak of this pandemic has far-reaching and even negative effects on many domestic industries, but for printing and consumable manufacturers, it has a relatively positive side, IDC said. The outbreak of the pandemic has spurred a surge in demand in the home printer market and the Chinese government has recently issued a general guidance strategy for the country ’s new infrastructure. IDC said that under the severe situation of foreign trade, it is imminent to boost domestic demand.

In the post-epidemic market, changing new models of offline and online marketing, developing home printing and new commercial scenarios in the context of big trends such as big data and cloud services are opening new ideas and opportunity for the printing consumable manufacturers, IDC concluded.