Printer Manufacture

Reviews of an industry traditionally look at the suppliers first then the consumers second. Sometimes this can be the wrong way to look at things: automobiles, food and furniture are consumer led.  Information and technology genuinely are sometimes producer led; invention, innovation and creation are keys to the future.

Innovations like personal computers, mobile phones, graphical computing, the Internet and social networking are innovations that get accepted, not consumer led.

Printing has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, the key changes being:

- the use of inkjet and laser printers replacing older impact technologies like dot-matrix printers.  Each new technology has passed advantages to a  new group of suppliers. The notable beneficiary has been HP.

- the growth of the PC market displacing the traditional typewriter and computer terminal. This brought a switch from big central printers to little local printers.

- the rising importance of colour and artwork. This trend would favour inkjet printers and it is a curiousity that the apparently more complicated laser printer designs have been able to adapt to the colour market.

- shifting business from traditional printing and publishing to desktop publishing.

Altogether the worldwide market for computers is of the order 25 million units per year, varying markedly with economic circumstances.

Currently the big trend is towards multifunction printer / copiers for both offices and homes.  In hardware terms this is little more than a printer with a scanner and a more elaborate control panel.  One big change is that copiers suddenly become quite  affordable for home as well as office use. The big opportunity is to balance this hardware with software and Internet services creating a gadget that can store documents to local disk, to a private space on a remote server or publish them as web pages and / or PDFs.  A few multifunction printers now have a decent built in screen to act a a web browser. Printers potentially have a very wide variety of uses. 

A long term trend we should expect is to print less and use screens more. For twenty years from the mid 1980s on this was anticipated with talk of the paperless office but didn't happen. With today's big flat screens and huge disks it may be more practical now.  As already suggested a reduction in business printing might not mean a decline in computer printing, rather computer printers might take on more of the work of traditional printing presses.

There will be new waves of innovation like wider application of print mechanisms to manufacturing and to 3D printing.

Manufacturers

Printers are made by a great variety of businesses. Like cameras, automotive instruments and sewing machines they combine electronics with a substantial collection of small mechanical  parts.

There are a lot of printer manufacturers. A list might include:

Agfa, Avery, Alps, Brother, Bull, Canon, Centronics, Citizen, Citoh, Dascom, Dataproducts, Dell, Durst, Dymo, Epson, Fuji Xerox, Fujitsu, Funai, Gestetner, Heidelberg, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Infotec, Intellitech, Intermec, Kodak, Konica-Minolta, Kyocera-Mita, Lanier, Lexmark, Mitsubishi, Mutoh, NCR, NEC, Newbury Data, Océ, OKI, Olivetti, Olympus, Panasonic, Pitney Bowes, Printronix, QMS, Ricoh, Roland, Sanyo, Sato, Samsung, Seiko, Sharp, SiPix, Sony, Star, Tally, Teco, Tektronix, Toshiba, Xerox and Zebra.

The list contains industrial giants who make almost everything, computer companies, photographic companies, photocopier makers, names traditional in the print industry and some manufacturers who specialise in particular kinds of printers.

The list also holds some dead but once famous names. The argument is that they can be revived or used as trading names. Quite a few printer companies do have factories, but many do not. All that is needed to make a unique and important new type of printer is a bright idea.  Next slide a formatter board made by an electronics assembly plant into an engine made by another printer maker, then find a market for the new idea. That is how the laser printer industry came about.

Details about printer manufacturers are given elsewhere. Here are thumbnail portraits of a few to suggest how the market works.

HP

The world's largest printer maker is Hewlett Packard (HP) with over half the market. HP is the world's largest supplier of PCs, notebooks and servers, HP also make cameras, scanners and network equipment. At one time HP were best known for scientific calculators which they still make. HP make the iPAQ range of PDAs and smartphones.  HP don't produce games consoles but have dabbled in TV and home entertainment.

HP is an old business with origins as a 1930s Californian garage start-up making oscillators, later it made  oscilloscopes, spectrum analysers and pen plotters. In the 1970s they made computers primarily intended for laboratory use and a notable line of  calculators. HP were not well known outside the scientific field.

HP seem to have discovered the inkjet principle independently and need for something better than a laboratory pen plotter suggested the "Thinkjet" product line. HP now have "Deskjet", "DesignJet", "OfficeJet" and "Photosmart" lines. Inkjet printers are one of HP's most significant products.

Laser printers will have earned HP more money; the "Laserjet" product line is found in offices worldwide and there are millions of them out there. This gives HP an enormous and guaranteed revenue stream.

Laser printers were actually invented at Xerox PARC in 1969. The first laser printer was basically a photocopier with a laser scanner controlled by a minicomputer. The machine was effective, producing 60 pages of text per minute but it was big and expensive. Ethernet was invented as a way to share such printers and graphical computing as a way to make full use of them. 

In the early 1980s Japanese photocopier maker Canon produced a small laser printer engine known as the LBP IV. HP and a couple of other manufacturers saw the potential of this machine and bought it in "engine" form adding a formatter board to suit it to their own purposes. HP's Laserjet (1984) was based on the Canon LBP IV engine with a formatter board and HP's own print language that suited PCs. QMS and Apple used the same engine with different formatters. The look of  Laserjet pages swiftly displaced typewriters and daisywheel printers in the word-processing market. In this case HP did not invent the technology but just as importantly they spotted the potential of a potential rival's product. HP has retained it's strength in laser printers and its machines are usually still based on Canon engines.

HP had competition in the laser printer and inkjet market but they have a reputation for delivering highly functional machines, a portfolio of designs and patents and a marketing ability. HP have been able to maintain a lead in printers for about 20 years and have a product in just about every area. Home photography without a computer might use the Photo A826. There is the portable DeskJet 450 and fast office printing might use the Edgeline CM8060. Engineers might use the Designjet T1120 MFP.

Curiously as we shall see they don't actually make printers. Laser printer engines are mainly sourced from Canon and equipped with HP's own formatter electronics.  Inkjets are made by contract assembly plants.

Printers have been the key to HP's modern market power.  Their growth in computing undoubtedly owes something to the excellent 3000 and 9000 series minicomputers and the Vectra line of PCs. However it seems that printers have been the main source of profit. HP has built itself into a globally recognised brand credible in almost every computing and communication product sector. HP and IBM both have worldwide revenues around $100 Billion and are the largest IT companies.

HP began making IBM-clone PCs in the 1980s but early models had compatability issues. Compaq were one of their main rivals and somewhat more successful with PCs. In the late 1990s HP bought Compaq. The instrument division that had founded the company was spun off as Agilent. Merging HP and Compaq wasn't a complete success at first, Dell still managed more PC sales. Recently HP has overtaken Dell as number one PC maker and one explanation might be the business strength created by revenues from printers.

HP bought computer services company EDS to stengthen their business in systems integration and support where it has been more focussed on hardware and field service. This reflects a general trend in electronics, the problems are not making things in factories but delivering what users want.

HP is a broad-range IT provider and it might be suggested that is needed to succeed in printers. An alternate suggestion is that strength in printers has financed HP's growth elsewhere. Confirmation might be that  Dell, HP's biggest rival in PC making has added printers to it's product portfolio. However the next largest competitor is Acer and they pulled out of printers apparently because they would confuse the brand image.

Samsung

Samsung is one of the largest of several broad range IT companiesinvolved in printers.

Samsung produces notebooks, printers, TV screens and mobile phones, the group is the worlds largest electronics company. Samsung also make kitchen equipment and are a major insurance company, shipbuilder and construction company. Group turnover was $173 Bn in 2008. Samsung is South Korea's largest company and responsible for 20% of the countries exports. Outside Korea Samsung is particualrly known for electronics. As a printer manufacturer Samsung has a particularly strong product range in multifunction units - printers with scanners.

Samsung is like HP and Dell in being a broad range IT supplier, its position as a consumer electronics brand is probably stronger than theirs. It is unlike them in running the factories that make many of the printers. It will be interesting to see is Samsung can be as fleet - footed in changing technologies and the mix of products as the market progresses.

There are lots of broad range manufacturers who aren't much involved in printers.

Sharp and Panasonic both have a  printer range but nothing like that offered by HP.

Sony make games, TVs and entertainment systems - but scarcely any printers.

Fujitsu once made band-printers and laser printers but have reduced that side of their business to dot matrix printers and page - scanners for commercial use. Fujitsu have largely withdrawn from the general printer market. They seem to be putting new emphasis on computers having taken full ownership of Fujitsu-Siemens, they make LCD monitors, and they are a datacenter and services company. In the UK Fujitsu bought ICL to get a regional service operation.

Hitachi aren't known for printers but made the SL1 colour laser printer DDP 70 and the PB and PXR range of continuous electrostatic non-contact industrial inkjets.  Presumably Hitachi have never seen opportunities outside the industrial and niche market. Hitachi are another big engineering company making everything from TV to trains.

Oracle are largely a software and services business but have bought Sun apparently to get some hardware interests and perhaps for its regional service network. Large software companies sometimes do have slightly odd hardware interests like Microsoft with it's mouse - and notably the X Box.

IBM once made 80% of the worlds computers but sold their printer making to Lexmark and their PC making to Lenovo; they are now largely a services company but are selling printers under their own name once again. The product range and ambitions of large companies can be curious.

Dell

Dell is an unusual company in the printer market in two respects: it is a PC maker marketing a line of printers, something other PC makers tend to ignore. Dell's whole business has also grown from scratch in twenty five years. 

Most of the companies mentioned above originated a long time ago - HP in the 1930s for instance. They grew to be engineering giants by the 1960s. Michael Dell started business in 1984 making PCs in his campus dormitory room from imported components. The business became Dell Computer Corporation in 1988. In 2002 Dell diversified from producing PCs offering TV's, audio players and printers and changed the name to Dell Inc to signal that it was no longer merely a PC maker.

Dell has been expanding its printer offerings, presumably they have realised that inks can give a continual income stream.

Printers are apparently made for Dell by Lexmark and by Funai. Funai are a Japanese consumer electronics company based in Osaka. Funai is a major OEM manufacturer making TVs for Philips Sharp and Toshiba - and printers for Lexmark. Dell's printers often look like Lexmark but need not be compatible for cartridge and are not guaranteed to be wholly compatible for other parts.

Lexmark

Lexmark are the second largest printer maker with around a quarter of the market. Lexmark make printers sold under their own name and also make the engines for printers sold under names such as Dell and IBM. Lexmark make laser and inkjet printers but not plotters.

Lexmark are different from the manufacturers mentioned so far becausethey are dedicated toprinters and multi-function printer-scanners. This should be a big advantage because Lexmark aren't cross subsidising the PC product lines from their ink revenues. 

Lexmark have been quite vigorous in defending their cartridge revenues in the courts. However they lost an action against Static Control to prevent it selling chips that would allow remanufacturing of chipped cartridges.

Lexmark was spun off from IBM in 1991 and for several years its designs showed this heritage.

Being a printer specialist  ought to have advantages but Lexmark's financial performance hasn't always reflected this. Their market share has tended to drop and they dropped out of the fortune 500 rankings in 2009.

Lexmark are finding new uses for printers, for instance adding a couple of cards to some of their recent machines gives the scanner OCR capabilities.

Precision Machinery

Brother and Epson both have a heritage as precision engineering companies. Brother is possibly better known for sewing machines than for printers. A precision engineering factory making and assembling large numbers of small parts ought to be able to make printers.  Brother made the body of Centronics' dot matrix machines in the 1970s and made a name for themselves with more advanced designs in the 1980s.

The surprise is that other clock and instrument makers like Smiths and Timex did not take to the printer market, considering that their traditional markets were under threat from electronic clocks. Presumably they did not really see a market for printers.

Seiko Epson's name derives from "precision" in Japanese.  Epson established a strong reputation with their dot-matrix printers in the 1980s and also made a very popular line of expandable portable computers. Epson's reputation was sufficiently strong that they launched a series of PCs  but later withdrew from what was becomming a very competitive and low margin market.

Photography

Conventional chemical photography has recently been displaced by digital cameras and inkjet printers. Durst, Kodak and Olympus have responded to the market by shifting their business to new areas. Durst made photographic enlargers but now make industrial inkjets. Kodak are positioning themselves as a supplier of home and special photographic printers, as are Olympus.

Fuji-Xerox is a large maker of photographic film who also have a long history making printers, notably many of the engines for Xerox. Fuji-Xerox also make the engines used by many others, for instance at one time they made printers badged by Compaq. Fuji-Xerox is no longer directly related to Xerox- the US company sold its share to Fuji.

The move to digitalphotography doesn't remove the need for cameras and lenses, just for film and processing.  The photography companies have to deal with further threats from:

- all mobile phones containing cameras - although they have neither the budget nor space for decent lenses.

- screens becoming so cheap and ubiquitious they can be used as digital picture frames. The current generation of frames are LCD screens but these will presumably be replaced by electronic paper frames as colour versions of that technology become low price. In the mid term these developments seem likely to  reduce the urge to print pictures.

Neither factor changes the market for professional photographic equipment yet. It does threaten those mass sales of amateur cameras that keep the production lines running and the dealer networks in place.

Thoughts along these lines have meant some old photographic names leaving the industry. Konica-Minolta transfered  their Digital SLR  interests to Sony for instance and now make medical imaging and printer products

Photography's traditional names do have a strength; well established market recognition worldwide.

Copiers

Multifunction laser printers and photocopiers are similar products. A multifunction printer is a laser printer combined with a scanner. A digital copier is also a laser printer combined with a scanner. Digital copiers have more capabilities than their analogue equivalent and cost less to make because they have simpler optics. Nevertheless printers and copiers may still be marketed in different ways.

Xerox patents made it the pre-eminent copier maker in the 1960s, it was almost a monopoly. Xerox PARC invented the laser printer. As the Xerox patents expired from the mid 1970s onwards Canon, Ricoh, Konica, Minolta and Sharp used Japan's advantage in electronic manufacturing to take a share of a growing market. These companies modelled their approach on Xerox, a staid and corporate look, selling printers in the same way as copiers with regional engineering and sales teams. Printers are often bought outright but copiers were usually bigger and more complex and put on some combination of lease and rental.

Canon is a major camera manufacturer but is as well known for copiers and printers and they have a worldwide service network.

Canon are strong in big digital copiers wheredecision makers want to see a salesman. Canon also do well with inkjets sold online and in local computer shops. Canon have been weak in mid range printers even though they actually make the mechanisms used by HP and others. Part of the problem is software - HP got in early with the PCL page description language and good drivers for Microsoft Windows.  Canon ran a big advertising campaign ("Canon Can") but have not picked up the market share in mid-range printers their technology seems to merit.

Ricoh has a long history in the copier market and a long and significant presence in printers. Statistics on printer market share can be deceptive -

Ricoh are the world's biggest copier company so they could be one of HPs most significant competitors  Ricoh have grown by aquisition of Danka ,Savin, Gestetner, Lanier and Rex-Rotary, Monroe and  Nashuatec. Most of these brands continue, Danka under the Infotec brandname.

Ricoh's problem is that they don't have much brand recognition in printers. Ricoh were selling laser print engines alongside Canon in the 1980s - they were typically badged as the DEC LN03 which was a competitor to the LaserJet.

Ricoh's DocumentMall software as a service document management idea is interesting.

Mergers are a trend in the copier and printer industry. Examples are Tally and Genicom - now Dascom, Konica - Minolta and QMS, Tektronix and Xerox.

On the whole copiers are bought by people who want to see a salesman so they are generally big machines sold by regional teams. Copiers have been specialist and expensive compared to most printers, hence the sales model based on an expert salesman and a leasing agreement.

Printers with similar capacities are more widely used so they can be lower in price. Printers are quite likely to be bought by people who just want the functionality and intend to look after it themselves very largely.

Specialists

There are quite a few specialists in the printer industry. Firms like Océ make specialist things like plotters  and high speed laser printers for production printing.  Sato make lable printers and Zebra barcode equipment. Durst make industrial inkjets. Their names are often known to the people who might buy their printers.

Some of the larger printer makers have found market niches as well. Hitachi's line of continuous electrostatic printer for instance. Panasonic used to produce a rather innovative laser printers but it proved rather troublesome. Now they are best known for dot-matrix.

Roland (who are more noted for musical instruments) are an interesting printer maker noted for Vinyl cutters, 3D printers and micro-machining.

Specialist printer makers aren't immune from market changes. Labelling specialists like Sato are repositioning their equipment to deal with RFID tags for instance.

Summary

Summarising what has been said, the printer industry is diverse withsomething over 40 brandname manufacturers from a variety of backgrounds. The dominant player is HP, a  big  second player is Lexmark and then there are lots of competitors with much smaller market shares. There are at least ten printer brands with broad portfolios and specific strengths.

HP is the world's biggest broadrange IT provider with products in almost every sector - networks, servers and mobile phones as well as printers. HP's strength is partly based on printer and cartridge sales.

Large computer companys often have an urge to produce printers; Compaq tried the idea before it was taken over by HP. Dell are selling printers as well and IBM have re-introduced printer products presumably because they see the value in the revenue stream from cartridges. 

Printer manufacturers need to work on a global scale, as does most of the electronics industry.

It isn't necessary to run a printer factory to be seen as a manufacturer - badge engineering and use of print engines is very common. Those unversed in the ways of the electronic industry can be cynical about badge engineering and wonder whether the item would not have been cheaper bought directly from the factory. What actually results is that a factory that could not have achieved a world market does so, giving better value generally.

Those who don't make printers might see them as a diversion although they can be a profit centre. There is also the paperless office mindset that might see printers as obsolescent technology.

Some large companies like Samsung are relatively recent makers of printers. A big company with an engineering background and some way of getting products to market can enter the global printer market. A smaller company will need to find a niche - some product no-one else provides. Or they can make engines that will generally be sold by others.