After a pretty flat stretch for most of the year, shipments rose from August to October, hitting a yearly high in October of $8.00 billion. Most of 2025 certainly had its challenges economically: the tariffopalooza did not help matters (although that has, fingers crossed, kind of stabilized), and the employment situation had looked a little concerning, but seems OK. 2025 had not been as good as 2024, at least up to the fall—we’re nervous about November and December—but it looks like we are making up some ground, and October shipments were on par with 2023. So there’s that.

Shipments are only half of the story; profitability is the other half, and as costs for just about everything continue to rise, printers can only pass so much of that onto customers, which means that despite how much shipments (aka revenues) rise, profitability may remain flat, or even decline.

Year-to-date (January to October) shipments for 2025 are at $73.83 billion, a bit below last year’s $75.06 billion. We still have a shot at matching 2024’s shipments numbers, but given what we usually see in the last two months of the year, we may come up a bit short.

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