With a wide offer in variety, models and suitability for different types of users, printer suppliers adapted to the change produced by the home office and expect a 2022 that closes similar to 2021.

Por Rodolfo Pollini

There is optimism in the printer business. The pandemic skyrocketed sales, and as demand exceeded supply, everyone is still waiting for a traction market.

“For the computer industry, a constant of the last two years was the lack of products,” said Mariano Giorgi, Senior Product Manager at Epson Latin America. "Today, demand adapts to what the industry can provide. Due to our manufacturing processes, at Epson we only began to notice this at the end of 2020. As the months went by, it improved, but we are not sure how it will continue, we depend on what happens in China. Seen from the demand side, we are returning to the pre-pandemic market, but with a supply that remains limited and that demand, although it has decreased, will remain partly unsatisfied. We estimate the market to be only 5% lower than that of 2021.”

“Before the pandemic we were already seeing a big change in the office printing solutions market,” said Juan Hauscarriague, MPS Product Manager at Xerox for Argentina and Chile.
“We do not talk about multifunction but rather about workplace assistant, because due to the number of functions they have, our equipment can be considered the center of an office, from the basic ones, for the Soho segment, to those for large production or digital printing presses.. In the post-pandemic period, a lot has been lost in the business segment because many workers, when working from home, acquired products similar to those they had in the offices but usable at home. Today there is hybrid work, that is why we highlight the breadth of our portfolio, from the smallest laser printer to office equipment.”

For Jorge Caviglia, Corporate Printing Category Manager at HP Cono Sur, there is a before and after the pandemic. “We had to react quickly because we were thinking about one type of business and the market began to ask for something else,” he said. “2020 was a year of transition but the sale of technology not only did not stop, but it grew.”

“We see that The printing market, in general and even with the economic situation, continues to grow and generate demand, especially from the pandemic and the home office, which generated great growth in printers for the home line, the entry line and also in the corporate sector, with the return to work in the offices," said Patricio Andueza, senior marketing analyst for the printing line at Brother. "We do not have an exact number of how much the market grew, but at Brother we could not cope because the demand was much greater than the supply of products we could deliver."

WHAT WAS THE HOME OFFICE LIKE?
“The migration of equipment from work in the office to home was not one by one as happened with notebooks, where each person needed one, but the demand for printers was notable and in many cases it was necessary for them to work the same as in companies, due to security protocols,” Caviglia recalled. “Security is a factor that at HP we were able to cover because we consider it part of the product design, to protect user data.”

Nictom entered the fiscal thermal printer business and one of the reasons was that only high-priced models arrived in Argentina. This was explained by Tomás Ardila, partner and owner of the company, and highlighted that today they offer models with the same features as their competitors for half the price. “Being a niche product, these printers have a greater profitability margin than mass products”, broad. "This allowed us to incorporate marketers to whom it is very tempting to sell them. We operate throughout the country and have 400 stores that distribute our products, although not all of them do so with thermal printers."

“Laser printing has advanced a lot and today has a greater position than expected, because the performance of inkjet technology is lower than that of laser technology”said Gonzalo Osorio, commercial manager of CBC Group S.A, a company that markets Pantum printers in Argentina. "Traditionally, laser equipment was for use in offices and there were no compact models for the home, like the ones we offer. We must add the possibility of color, a laser technology that at Pantum we already have with a printer and a multifunction for the home, although not yet available in Argentina."