According to the British Facsimile Industry Consultative Committee, there are more than 900,000 fax machines in use in the UK, and that figure is expected to top 1m this year. The figures are based on sales information from BFICC member companies, including all major UK facsimile machine suppliers, and they cover all machines bought within the last five years an estimate of a facsimile machine’s working life. Sales are not as buoyant as a couple of years ago, however, as BFICC chairman Lester Davis admits. He says that there has been a tailing off since the market’s Gold Rush days following the 1988 postal strike. This led to numerous suppliers entering the market, and a subsequent price war that damaged the technology’s image. Davis is hesitant about commenting on the effects of that period, but says I don’t think the market came out very well from the large number of suppliers that came in. Since that time, the Facsimile Industry Committee has stopped publishing sales predictions, making trend analysis more difficult. Its reasons for doing this stem from past years when over-enthusiasm by some of the suppliers led to inflated forecast figures being published.
