News

Optimistic IDC report for production sales

13 March 2015

Pat yourselves on the back! 
The International Data Corporation's analysis of the last quarter of 2014 is out, with excellent news for Konica Minolta and good news for ALL production print manufacturers and vendors worldwide.

Printing money
Strategies for Web-to-print and cross-platform marketing inter alia have favoured short runs with variable data - and the appetite for digital press output worldwide has delivered over 50% growth in (full) production machine demand.  Shipment value for all categories (Mid Production, full Production and Label & Packaging) is up too, but only by 4.5% - revealing a healthy but highly competitive marketplace for production press manufacturers.

Market shares
Xerox are still flying high with over half of worldwide production digital press marketshare, but small growth in shipment value.  The Konica Minolta Group's 17.2% increase in shipment value on only a small increase in market share is the best profitability news in the IDC report.  Konica Minolta's increased sales to over 92 million dollars in 2014 Q4 puts them now only just behind Ricoh, whose sales declined by 7.5% in the same period.  Canon's sales slid significantly in the last quarter of last year, but 12.6%.

Regional growth
Looking at the regional variations, the best news for 2014 has been in the EMEA with year-on-year growth in production machine shipment volumes of 23.2%.  With the Euro already sliding and substantial questions in southern and eastern Europe, this is unlikely to be remain the case for long.  North America shipments grew at 19.4%, and this remains the most lucrative marketplace for production printing.  Asia/Pacific sales grew by 14.7%, but this excludes disappointing figures from Japan.