Thermal Transfer Ribbon Market Trends

Growth Drivers

• Growing Integration of IoT in Printing – IoT connected brings many new features to printers, which is likely to boost the demand for thermal printers followed by the thermal transfer ribbon market. The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as vending machines, thermostats, security cameras, and networked printers, was predicted to reach 20 to 50 billion by 2020 all across the world.

• Rising E-Commerce in the World – E-commerce has boosted the logistics, and online delivery of packages, with the growing e-commerce industry shipping labels, receipts, and barcodes also increased.  Globally more than a quarter of all retail sales, or USD 5 trillion, were made through retail e-commerce for the first time in 2022. By 2025, total spending on retail e-commerce is likely to be around USD 7 trillion. 

• Growing Use of Thermal Printers in the Medical Sector – thermal printheads are used in making patient wristbands, labels, freezer storage, identification, and others. Owing to COVID-19, the number of patients visiting hospitals significantly rose. In the United States, hospitals saw over 1,55,000 covid patients as of January 2022.

• New Launches of Thermal Printer Technology – For instance, the newest software that enables individuals to print at any time and any location is released by Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc. Toshiba completely streamlines the printing process with its e-BRIDGE Global Print technology.

• Increasing Use of Automatic Identification – Identification is an important application of security labels, such as barcodes, labels, and tags are all printed with the help of thermal printers and facilitate automatic identification. With a nearly 109% increase in cashless transactions from 2020 to 2025, Asia-Pacific will experience the fastest growth, followed by Africa and Europe with gains of around 76% and 79%, respectively, from 2025 to 2030.

Challenges

• Adverse impact on the environment - a poly-based material is used in the production of thermal transfer ribbons. This material is extracted from crude oil products, which is likely to lead to increased mining and eventually will impact the market growth. Moreover, the production of this poly blades material generates a huge amount of waste material, which also contributes to environmental pollution and is expected to hamper the market growth.
• Various substitutes of thermal transfer ribbon are available 
• Strict regulations on printing