The printer cartridge busi-ness makes up in cash what it lacks in glamour. Every year people buy $40 billion worth of ink and toner, that sooty mix of pigment and magnesium powder used in laser printers. At Lexmark, the nation's second-largest printermaker, ink and such made up half of the company's $4 billion revenue last year and fetched the bulk of its $370 million profit. Good luck keeping the cash box. The billion-dollar fiefdoms dominated by Lexmark, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, Canon and other large printer manufacturers are under attack from thousands of small aftermarket outfits that collect empty cartridges and repair and refill them at a deep discount. Their share of the ink market is somewhere around 19%, says Lyra Research, with most of their captured territory falling in the corporate market, where orders can come in for thousands of refills at a time.
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