Distributed printing is growing. Currently, about 3 trillion pages are printed each year in the home and office. While this is a tremendous amount, it is only 5 percent of the total world paper usage of around 60 trillion pages. The vast majority of pages are printed outside the home and office - books, magazines, newspapers, etc. - what you would call mass publication. These pages are then transported into the home and office in paper form. The Internet, however, is having a significant impact on this flow. As this content comes online, it will be delivered electronically directly to users, who can print or not print, but will do so only for their personal productivity in the home or office. As a result, we believe that the amount of pages being printed in a distributed way, in the home or office, will increase significantly. Instead of being 5 percent of total paper usage, we believe that by 2010 it could represent 10 percent to 15 percent or more of total paper usage. This means that the 3 trillion pages currently printed in the home or office could grow to possibly 8 trillion pages by the end of the decade.
We believe the future of printing is distributed printing and that the Internet will continue to increase distributed print output at a compounded annual rate of 7 percent to 12 percent. So, the market is moving toward distributed output and pages, and that is where Lexmark is focused. We are in the distributed output business in both the home and office. |
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