Market intelligence bible has expanded its industry coverage to include a comparison between the imports of offset presses and digital printers with some surprising results.
Separating digital printers by weight may be a novel way of classifying technology but it’s proved to be a winner for the IndustryEdge team. Building on the decision of the Australian Bureau of Statistics to start recording numbers for the import of digital printers in the middle of 2015, Pulp & Paper Edge has highlighted the decline of offset presses and the growth of digital printers imported into Australia.
According to the report, imports of offset printing presses and related equipment continued to slump throughout 2015, despite a couple of months in which values spiked because of specific imports. Very few items of offset printing equipment were imported to Australia in 2015, even as digital equipment imports rose.
Inevitably with larger and more expensive pieces of equipment monthly values can spike on a single import.
It is a similar story with the number of items imported each month. They peaked at the start of the period, reaching 5,400 units in July 2015 and falling as low as 93 units in August 2015.
On the other hand digital printing equipment imports were worth AUD611.3M in 2015. IndustryEdge makes a distinction between single-function and multi-function devices as well as separating them by weight.
For ease of management, IndustryEdge classified devices weighing <100kg, from 100kg to 500kg and above 500kg. Our rationale is that the lightest devices are mainly SOHO (small office, home office), the middle weights are mid-sized offices and those deployed widely across larger offices.
The heavy weights (>500kg) are assumed to be mainly commercial in nature and include digital presses installed by printers. What is clear is that as the number and value of offset printing equipment imports have fallen, the number and value of digital printing equipment items has increased.
Tim Woods and his team at IndustryEdge have drawn some conclusions in respect of this import trade that in 2015 was worth AUD611.3M for digital printing devices alone. First, smaller devices for the small and home office environment are dominating the market. Second, imports of single-function devices are growing swiftly while imports of multi-function device imports appear to be in decline.
The implications for the paper market are obvious, at least in part. The emphasis on the use of pre-packaged office papers (cut reams) is clear. While the SOHO revolution also seems clear, what may not be so obvious is how that market is largely a retail market and not a more traditional business-to-business operating environment.