I am researching the fax-to-email market and want to understand the
current fax market.  Since email has taken off, the success of the
fax-to-email market requires that a critical mass of fax machines
continue to exist.

My questions in order of importance:

* How many fax machines are there worldwide?
* Is the number of fax machines growing or shrinking? (Presumably not
growing, but concrete data would be valuable)
* What are projections for the number of fax machines worldwide 5 or 10 years out?
* How many fax machines are there in the United States?

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Clarification of Question by strategicinvesting-ga on 01 Jun 2004 07:38 PDT

alleepally - thanks.  that is very helpful on questions 1 and 4 (with
some international data as well).  How do I give you some of the $25?

neilzero - For my purposes, I am looking for active individual fax
machines (regardless of how active they are).  You are correct,
scanners attached to computers and fax-to-email both _could_ be
counted, but I am eager to understand the magnitude of long term
survival of the fax market.  If there are many stand alone fax
machines, then it stands to reason that many/most businesses will
maintain a fax presence.  Therefore, lets define active fax machine as
a standalone fax machine having a connected phone number to it so that
it could receive faxes.

Have a look here

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph-T/med_fax_mac

some interesting stats on a country by country basis.

Have a look here as well (100 million fax machines worldwide estimate)

http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/faxtech_test/topic01.html

Extract from above:

Since then, fax machines have become accepted as indispensable
communications devices throughout the world, and today there are over
100 million fax machines worldwide. Per year, fax traffic now exceeds
400 billion pages, and the worldwide fax phone bill is more than 91
billion dollars. In fact, fax transmissions account for between 30 and
40 percent of the typical corporate phone bill today.

There are several problems to making even a good approximation. ie A
fax machine averages ten faxs per month sent and received. Does it
count as one along with the thousand fax per month machine? Do back up
and unsold inventory of new machines count? Likely we should not count
the 100 million used fax machines that will likely never receive
another fax successfully. Do you want to count computers that have
scaners and are occassionly used like a fax machine?  Neil

This might interest you:

?It is estimated that there are 112 million fax machines in use in the
world today with more than 6 million new units sold each year. Despite
the rise of email and the Internet, fax continues to be an important
means for business communications. One of the main reasons that fax
has seen continued growth is its simplicity. Fax machines are easy to
use and hence a simple way to receive documents quickly, safely and
securely.?

Brooktrout Technology
http://www.brooktrout.com/whitepapers/pdf/fax_over_ip.pdf
http://www.embeddedstar.com/technicalpapers/content/b/embedded1897.html

Fax continues to be an important and cost-effective means for
business-to-business and business-to-customer communications. It is
estimated that more than 90% of U.S. businesses have fax machines in
the office and sales of fax machines in recent years have maintained a
slow, but steady growth rate. Even with the popularity
of email, more than 7.5 million fax machines were sold in 2002 alone.
Brooktrout, Inc.
http://www.brooktrout.com/whitepapers/pdf/v34_whitepaper.pdf