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Lexmark follows suit with UK consumables price increases

Issue #0433/1 - Exchange rates hit the British again, to the tune of 2.4%, as the Pound weakens against US Dollar and the Euro. But—not all products are affected and there is one big reduction.

As predicted, Lexmark has increased UK pricing on many of its consumables products in response to the weakening exchange rate between the UK and both the US Dollar and the Euro zone.

Adjustments are far from consistent, however. Lexmark has made a very clear distinction between business products and home consumer products in its pricing strategy.

  • Over 95% of the business products (mono laser, colour laser, business inkjet and dot matrix) have experienced an increase amounting to an average of 2.4% - so half a percentage point lower than the average increase imposed by Hewlett-Packard at the beginning of the month and about 2.5 percentage points lower than those implemented by Xerox in July.
  • All business-oriented media (e.g. transparencies) has been increased in line with toner products.
  • No consumer inkjet products have suffered an increase.
  • No consumer paper products (e.g. glossy photo media) have suffered an increase.
  • One consumer glossy photo media product has been reduced by 44%.
10×15cm glossy Photo media is reduced by 44%.10×15cm glossy Photo
media is reduced by 44%.
Within the business sector, the adjustments generally range from a minimum increase of 1.7% to a maximum of 5.4% but, unlike recent Hewlett-Packard price changes, there is no discernable rounding effect determining the exact percentage applied.
Indeed, there are just a handful of products that are not affected at all – several dot matrix ribbons & ribbon shields; black and colour ink cartridges for the Colour Jetprinter 2070; and the black ink cartridge for a range of Samsung MFPs and fax machines.
Furthermore, there are a handful of products that have had their price reduced, by up to 3.7%. These include the low-yield toner cartridges for the T520/522 and T620/622 laser printers.
Experiencing the highest increase of 5.4% is the 14,000-page toner cartridge for some of the older Optra mono laser printers.
Old Optra Cartridge

On the consumer side, ink products and media remain, on the whole, unchanged but with a few products discontinued and one product with a big price change. This major change is significant because it is a reduction of 44% on a 60-sheet pack of glossy 10×15cm photo paper (0021G0711), pushing the cost of media per photo down from 14 pence to just 8 pence, excluding VAT (16.5 pence to 9.5 pence including VAT).

In March of this year, while undertaking testing of photo printers, we found that 10×15 glossy photo media could range from 13.4 pence per sheet right up to 70 pence per sheet – the average was 30.3 pence. In addition, we did not find any Lexmark media in the stores. So, for Lexmark to now be offering glossy media at 9.5 pence per sheet, is great news for the home photo enthusiast and could have the effect of encouraging other manufacturers to review their pricing in order to reduce the overall cost of producing those all-important album prints.

Finally, the October price list includes two new ink cartridges, see "New generation inkjet products break the Lexmark mould – photo printer, AiO and MFP"!

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2004 at 12:03 am and is filed under Supplies, Pricing, News, Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.