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The IT peripherals market in India is one segment in the IT hardware space which is growing at a healthy pace year on year. If we look at the market composition, segments like printers, monitors, UPSes, mouse, keyboards and memory make up the peripherals market. Of the total pie, printers take up a lion's share: the total printer market during 2005-06 was Rs 2,091 crore. Other peripherals devices also had a good run, especially monitors and UPSes. Here's a look at the segment wise performance of the peripherals market during 2005-06.

Printers: Changing Scenario
Over the year the Indian market has become a burgeoning one for printers. India is also one of the geographies in the world where the market for impact printers is growing at a healthy pace. During 2005-06, the dot matrix printer (DMP) segment grew by 15% with major vendors TVSE, Epson and WeP battling it out for greater market share. The government vertical continues to drive the DMP market, especially during the last one year with the implementation of VAT by many state governments. DMPs are able to withstand competition from non-impact technologies because of their ruggedness and they are well suited for mass printing. The total running cost of DMP is also far lower. Sanjay Khandkar, business manager, business products, Epson India, says: "The Dot Matrix printers have very low failure rates. The print heads we use in our printers will run for years."

Market leader TVSE shipped close to 185,169 units of DMPs in the last year. The chunk of business came from segments like retail, SME, government and BFSI. Other vendors like Epson and WeP also attacked the market with several of their DMP offerings. Epson shipped around 178,320 units, while WeP followed suit with 124,402 units. In sum the total size of the impact market during 2005-06 in unit terms stood at 495,770 units.

On the inkjet and laser printer side of things, it was HP that dominated the charts. The total market size for inkjets in 2005-06 was estimated at 6.6 lakh units, a marginal decline compared to the previous year. According to vendors, standalone inkjets will continue to plateau as a result of the growing popularity of MFDs. This becomes clearly evident as we look at the vendor wise shipment numbers for the last year. Except HP, all other leading players in the single function inkjet space saw decline in unit shipments compared to the previous year. The trends don't indicate any change in that position. Analysts say that mid-to-high end inkjets will have a good market as user needs like photo printing will drive the market.

Laser printers on the other hand are booming year after year. An audit for the fiscal ended March 2006 revealed a thriving market, having grown by a healthy 51% with volumes crossing the four lakh mark. Yet again HP dominates the market with 70% market share. The market also saw the rapid escalation of players like Konica, Minolta and Brother. The biggest value proposition of laser printers is the low running cost and higher quality output. PG Kamath, general manager, Lexmark International India, says, "We offer a comprehensive range of laser printing solutions starting with the entry level 20 ppm and going right up to 55 ppm products. The range includes standalone and network printers in A3 and A4 configurations"

MFDs: Star Performers
In the printer space, 2005-06 can very well be termed as the year of MFDs. Riding on the convergence capabilities, MFDs impressively ramped in good volumes with HP dominating the A4 MFD segment. The biggest growth driver for MFDs is the TCO of one device with multiple capabilities: An entry level laser printer will cost around Rs 8,000, add to it an analog copier at Rs 30,000 and an entry level basic scanner at Rs 4k. In all, it adds up to Rs 48,000. An A4 laser MFD, in contrast, today costs around Rs 12-16,000 or even less.

When we look at the adoption of these converged output devices by enterprises, it is the laser MFDs that rule this space. A closer look reveals the market segmentation of the laser MFDs across four types of output speeds measured in 'pages per minute' (ppm). The entry-level laser segment is characterized by 1 to 20 ppm and segment two starts with 21 to 30 ppm speeds. The higher segments are those that cater to 21 to 44 ppm and 44-60 ppm.

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