Copier industry seen to fade away in 3 yrs

The copier industry has reached its "sunset stage" and is expected to be replaced by multi-functional printing devices within the next three years.

This was the prediction made over the weekend by Joergen Jakobsen, Asia Pacific marketing director for Hewlett-Packard imaging and printing solutions during the New Digital Office press symposium.

According to Jakobsen, the strong growth in digital information coupled with convenience and low cost of ownership, has led to the increase in printing and decrease in copying.

Copying, he pointed out, would merely become a function of the printers, thus, there would no longer be any need to buy a specific device for it.

"The sales of copiers is declining extremely fast. And in the next three years, the copier as we know it today will be gone," he said.

Jakobsen noted that in Australia for example, stand alone analog copiers will no longer be in existent by next year. The same trend is, likewise, being seen even in emerging markets.

"People tend to print more and copy less. And going digital is less expensive. Everyone's going to that direction. The copier industry has not seen much changes over the years," he explained.

Jakobsen said that instead of investing on different office equipment such as a printer, scanner, copier and fax machine, companies would save more time, money and space by buying one device that integrates all such capabilities.

Global research and marketing group International Data Corporation (IDC), though, painted a slightly positive scenario for the copier industry.

IDC analysts Sandra Ng said that copying is expected to stay even in information technology savvy markets due to higher speed and much affordable prices.

However, the use of copiers in Asia Pacific will remain more prevalent in developing countries such as Thailand, PRC, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and the Philippines where the use of computes is not yet very high, according to a study.

On the other hand, mature markets such as Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Korea and Australia are increasingly printing more copies on a network-ready/capable printer.

With the convergence of printing and copying, Ng said there is a very stiff competition between printing and copier vendors as to who will emerge as market leader.

At present, traditional copier manufacturers are aggressively adding more and better features into their machines to provide a good total solution to end-users.

On the other hand, printer vendors such as HP are banking on their traditional computer and network expertise to capture the attention of IT managers.

"Copier vendors are facing bigger challenges. They need to go into networking very fast but there are things you just don't learn in a very short period. HP, for instance, has 20 years of experience in this area. It will take them some time to get to our level," Jakobsen said.