Research firm RBR reported that the number of installed self-checkout (SCO) terminals worldwide totaled 111,400 at the end of last year, a 23 percent rise from yearend 2008, according to the 2010 edition of RBR's annual Global EPOS and Self-Checkout study.
RBR forecasts that the number of SCO installations worldwide will more than triple to 381,800 by yearend 2015.
SCO terminals allow customers at retail outlets to handle the payment and/or bagging/scanning components of the checkout process themselves, whereas regular electronic point-of-sale terminals (EPOS) require the assistance of a member of staff.
SCO technology was introduced more than two decades ago but has only begun to gain in popularity in recent years. Over the last few years, it has been accepted not only by supermarkets and hypermarkets, like Walmart and Carrefour, but also by general merchandise retailers such as Costco and even pharmacies such as Walgreens.
Terminals are also being seen more often in smaller outlets such as convenience stores and discounters. In spite of recent progress, self-checkout terminals remain a niche product in all but a handful of countries, and they still have a long way to go to reach the level of penetration achieved by assisted electronic point-of-sale terminals.
RBR found that NCR, Fujitsu, IBM and Wincor Nixdorf are the world's biggest SCO manufacturers, both in terms of the number of shipments in 2009 and the size of their installed bases at the end of that year. The world's other SCO vendors tend to focus either just on their home market or on a handful of countries.
North America continues to have the largest installed base of self-checkout devices of any region, with 84,000 units representing 75 percent of the global total. Western Europe was home to nearly 21,000 machines, while Asia Pacific had 5,500, and both regions saw more than 50 percent growth during 2009. The remaining three regions still have just 1,000 installations between them. RBR's research also revealed that in 2009 a total of 24,500 SCO shipments were made worldwide, up 10 percent from the previous year despite the global recession.
The individual markets where SCOs have been deployed most widely are the United States and Canada in North America, the United Kingdom, France and Germany in Europe, and Japan and Australia in Asia Pacific. These few countries account for the vast majority of the global installed base.
