COVID-19 has had an impact on the photo print market

COVID-19 has had an impact on the volumes in photo prints. We saw that the online market grew by 8.2% in 2020 and that the percentage of online sales clearly grew. In 2020, 48.7% of photo print purchases were made online, compared to 39.2% a year earlier. On the other hand, retail sales photo print volumes declined. We observed a decrease of 26.6% there. The total of online and retail sales shows a modest reduction of just 13% in the challenging year of 2020. The large labs are even reporting growth during 2020. Further growth online is expected to continue. It will be at the expense of the prints made on-site.

The large photo labs in Western Europe mainly use Fujifilm’s original photographic paper with AgX technology for photo prints and lay-flat photo books while using the fast printing and processing technique offered by Imaging Solutions AG (Switzerland). Thanks to that these large photo labs can expect growth in the coming years. It seems a sensible choice for these labs to invest now in fast printing and processing equipment. Calculations show that photo labs can expect an excellent return on investment. That conclusion could have been drawn earlier since COVID-19 has made this even more visible.