The company says the laser printing industry continues the downward trend, primarily driven by the sales volume loss of low price-band models – with the combined shipment of copier-based and printer-based laser declining by 8.8% YoY.

And fax-based laser fell sharply (-72.1% YOY) and its share is now less than 0.3% in the laser market, evaporating by two-thirds in a year.  

IDC says most key players displayed a negative YoY performance in varying degrees during 2018 Q1.

For inkjet printers, Canon dropped more than one-fifth of its shipments since 2017 Q1, as their focus shifted to higher value models, while Brother and HP filled the gap left by Canon, increasing their inkjet market share by 1.2% and 2.8% respectively.  

And for laser peripherals, Fuji Xerox experienced a decline of 30%, with IDC noting they are still trying to recover from top-level executive and board resignations after the accounting scandal.

HP, Ricoh and Kyocera Document Solutions were consistent with the shrinking market, while IDC says that Brother, in contrast, took share from competitors and posted positive YoY growth of 6.5%, strengthening its position in the laser market.

IDC says top brands are shifting focus to higher-end models.

"As the print space in Australia reaches saturation, brands try different tactics to enhance market share. Some have changed strategy to reallocate resources to high end products to help improve profit" says Jimmy Li, associate market analyst at IDC Australia.

In another key finding, IDC says that in Australia, top 5 HCP brands dominated more than 94% of the entire market, with shipment units of these models with relatively low speed or low price significantly decreasing over the past two quarters.

And colour laser printers in the 1-20 ppm speed range recorded a 51.3% YoY decline, while mono laser shipments decreased 19.9% YoY. Similarly, Inkjet models priced A$131 (US$100) dropped by 13.5%YoY.

IDC also notes that single-function printers are slowly taking share from multi-function printers.

According to IDC, an abnormal phenomenon was noticed in the past quarter, showing that laser multi-function peripherals declined more and recovered slower than single function – and by the end of March, SFPs had occupied 46.6% in the laser market which was a 1.6% YoY growth.