Issue #0520/2 - Prices of many ink and toner cartridges in the UK rise again.
Almost all of Lexmark’s mono toner cartridges in the UK suffer price increases of 3% to 4% while the company drops pricing on its entire Linea range of Hewlett-Packard compatibles by 2.1%.
Furthermore, as noted in previous pricing reviews, Lexmark has reduced the prices of consumables for its current range of colour laser printers but increased prices on discontinued products.
Decreases on the current range are 1.7% and 2.1%, depending on product. Increases on consumables for discontinued products range between 2.7% and 3.8%.
These adjustments are clearly not exchange rate related. Seemingly a pattern for Lexmark, consumables prices appear to be introduced at a relatively high level, reduced during the life of the product and then increased at some point after the product has reached end-of-life.
Even price changes on ink jet consumables vary from 3.5% to –4.4%. Cartridges for the long defunct J110 business inkjet printer suffer from the highest increases of 3.5%, while it is the current #32 black cartridge that benefits from the 4.4% reduction in price — probably to encourage black business printing on the inkjet devices.
To balance this increase, prices for the colour cartridges that accompany the #32 are all increased by 2%.
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