Benchmark Your Market Share

(NPES International E-commerce Website, March 28, 2008)  Have you ever wondered where the concentration of book printers is in North America? What about how large the market is for blankets in the Northeast? How about how much ink is consumed by the newspaper printer? These and numerous other queries are answered in the newest PRIMIR study. Completed by State Street Consultants for PRIMIR, the newly released Benchmarking 2006 North American Printers & Consumables study provides volumes of statistics about all size printers in a variety of markets and geographic regions.

Principally, the study benchmarked the 2006 consumption of paper, ink, blankets, toner and plates for the U.S. and Canada by geographic region (country, state/province, U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area [MSA], and U.S. 3-digit zip) and by market segment. Sites using printing presses, digital production presses, and/or wide format printers were evaluated and grouped into various market segments, including commercial printers, in-plant printers, newspaper printers, catalog printers, book printers, directory printers and digital imaging services.

If you are involved in strategic planning, new market development, sales and marketing management, or territory, financial or resource planning, these statistics will be of immense value for all sorts of cross analysis.

The major output from this study is a complex user-modifiable model developed in Microsoft Access where an NPES or PRIMIR member can personalize and update the model for their own purposes and keep it fresh as time moves on to reflect changes in the marketplace.

The model contains a wealth of information on the number of sites, presses/printers, and the consumables they use by market segment for a variety of geographic breakdowns.

This data can be used to support multiple requirements – planning, staffing, resource allocation, sales territory development and
more. A user with Microsoft Access skills will be able to:
• increase or decrease the number of sites;
• change the penetration of an equipment category;
• change the average number of units/total units;
• change the consumption per site amounts;
• run ad hoc queries to export data to Excel for custom analysis; and,
• group U.S. 3-digit zip, U.S. MSA, state or province, into larger groups to estimate potential.

There were approximately 57,000 sites in the U.S. and Canada in the market segments covered by this study at the end of 2006. Commercial printers with fewer than 20 employees and in-plant printers/CDRs (central reproduction departments) are the segments with the largest number of sites.

This report provides estimates of 38 consumables categories for 19 market segments in the 57,000 sites in the U.S. and Canada. It also provides an estimate of the total number of sites in the market segments covered, the number of sites with equipment in one of the six categories of equipment covered by this study, and cites how many of each of these presses or printers are installed.

The Benchmarking 2006 North American Printers & Consumables study is a statistical model, not a one-toone representation of specific company locations. Users will need to apply their own insider knowledge to make it more precise. For example, if you know you sell more of a particular consumable than is represented in a particular 3-digit zip, increase the amount shown. State Street Consultants worked with a knowledgeable team of PRIMIR members to apply a sanity check to gross consumption totals prior to finalizing the report and model.

Members can also use mapping software to depict concentration of a particular market segment or to view consumption concentration as shown in the example below for book printers.

An Executive Synopsis detailing the key findings of this study has been distributed to all NPES members. If you wish to receive a copy of the complete report along with the CD that contains the spreadsheets and Access model, contact Rekha Ratnam at NPES at phone: 703-264-7200 or e-mail: rratnam@npes.org.