HP Asia Pacific and Japan invited 700 printers and two dozen journalists to Beijing on the eve of China Print to hear its thoughts for the future of digital print, Wayne Robinson reports
Less than a decade ago HP’s involvement in graphic arts was fairly low key, limited to its Designjet wide format printers, used mainly in proofing and poster printing. Today the company is one of the biggest suppliers in the business, is at the driving edge of digital printing through its purchase and development of Benny Landa’s Indigo business, and is easily the largest large format inkjet printer vendor worldwide. It is also expanding into new markets, such as packaging coding, and is waiting to unleash its high speed inkjet web on the world.HP’s influence on graphic arts is becoming highly significant, and it is helping change the industry into digital, in fact it is more than helping, it is delivering viable digital print solutions, showing printers around the world some pathways to profit through moving away from commodity type ink on paper and into value add marketing solutions, with print a key component.
The print industry can take heart from HP’s involvement, for there were many areas for the company to spend its cash, and that it has pumped so much money into print signals its confidence in a viable future. That future though is not based on traditional mass produced print, but on direct, targeted print, as part of an overall marketing mix. The company’s belief is clearly resonating with printers in Australia and the Asia Pacific, with some 700 of them taking time out from their schedules to attend a two day HP InfoTrends seminar in Beijing HP claims a remarkable 74 per cent market share in the high end colour digital printing market across the Asia Pacific including Australia. That is the sector that primarily contains the Indigo, Fuji Xerox iGens, Kodak Nexpress and the Xeikon solutions. It has around 5000 Indigos running around the world, with 200 in China and approaching 100 in Australia. However it believes it is only scratching the surface, and that as the world turns digital and HP plays its part in hastening that, its sales of Indigo will rocket.
HP’s analysis is that there are 53 trillion pages printed in colour around the world each year, and that by the yar 2010 some ten per cent of them will be digital, the current economic crisis not withstanding. In fact it is HP’s view that the global financial crisis will hasten the rush to digital. Chris Morgan, senior vice president imaging and printing group for HP Asia Pacific says, “According to a recent Gartner report the top four needs of business in the current climate are to improve processes, reduce costs, improve effectiveness and measure a return on cash employed. Digital printing enables all these requirements to be met, and once companies make the switch to digital, forced in part by their need to meet these requirements, they will not be gong back to analogue printing.”
VS ‘Harry’ Hariharan, vice president of graphic arts solutions at HP says the company is recording a 40 per cent increase in HP impressions year on year, a rate of growth that has not slowed down in the face of the current economic adversity. According to Hariharan there are three key reasons that his company will continue to be the vanguard of the digital printing revolution in the coming years; leadership, product portfolio and its new all embracing software solution SmartStream Director. Hariharan says, “in leadership we re creating a community of digital printers. This event for instance has 700 printers from all around the region together, easily the largest of its kind seen. The awards attracted more than 350 entrants this year, up 60 per cent on next year. And shortly the independent user group Dscoop will be launching in the Asia Pacific, it has been very successful in the US.” Dscoop is not run by HP, although it is a member.
Hariharan continues, “In product portfolio we continue to develop our solutions, the new label press ws6000 for instance is twice the speed of the previous machine, and with the short run labels business showing a 16 per cent CAGR this machine is already proving very successful.” It is in the new SmartStream Director software solution that HP is placing much faith, believing its all encompassing nature, from online ordering, job creation, preress, digital front end, printing, finishing despatch and billing will prove the knockout punch, enabling its customers to work at optimum efficiency, with everything that can be automated, including customer admin, done so in the system.
In addition to Indigo of course HP is now the world’s biggest wide format solutions supplier with a huge range of product and dominating market share in some sectors. At PacPrint printers will have seen some of the scope of HP technology, with its recent purchases of Scitex, Nur and Colorspan, in addition to its own technologies, propelling it to the top of the wide format tree. HP will be building on its position, as it sees display graphics continuing its own upwards curve in the years ahead. Its recent innovations include the LS6550 Latex printer, the environmentally friendly printer.
Perhaps the biggest optimism for the future of digital printing during the event came from the man who is in charge of Indigo, Alon Bar-Shany, who told the assembled printers that digital pages will rise tenfold by 2016, as they did in the period 2000-2008. Bar-Shany said this was a 35-40 per cent year on year growth in the last eight years, and it is continuing.
According to Bar-Shany digital is being driven along at such pace by the four mega trends powering the world; growth, the environment, globalisation and technology. Growth he said is the inevitable result of the human population rising by some 211,000 people a day, a ‘net gain’ as he put it, and most of that growth is in the Asia Pacific region. Consumption is also moving faster in the developing world, this quarter for instance was the first ever where US new car consumption fell from first spot, to second behind China. In 2000 some 18 million cars were sold in the US, compared to just three million in the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India and China).. In 2008 those figures had changed to 15 million cars each. Bar-Shany said that paradigm shift is sweeping through print too, and predicted that by 2012 the dollar value of digital print would be greater than that of offset.
Is Print History was the provocative title of the presentation given by Jeff Hayes, president of InfoTrends to the assembled printers. With the rise of electronic communication through the internet, sms, e-readers and the like printers could be forgiven for feeling a tad nervous. However not suprisingly Hayes gave print a big green for go, arguing that the world was full of opportunity for those businesses that could transform themselves from printers into marketing services providers, or MSPs as he put it.
The companies that made the move would, argued Hayes, be operating in at least part of the following categories; variable data, on demand printing, web to print and multi channel marketing.
His InfoTrends colleague Barbara Pellow said that web to print would be a certain growth area over the coming years. According to her figures some 11 per cent of US businesses were buying at least some print over the internet in year 2000, a figure which has now risen to 65 per cent. She says that at present only 14 per cent of printers are web enabled, but this will rise to 45 per cent by next year. According to Pellew’s figures profit margins on web work are up by an average of 7.4 per cent, volumes up by eight per cent.
Pellow says that the average person sees between 250 and 3000 marketing messages a day, so the need to slice through the clutter and get straight to the recipient is great, which is where personalisation, one to one and multi channel marketing come in.
For marketeers this delivers increased revenue – their goal – improved response rates and justified dollar marketing costs, while for printers it means increased profits, better customer retention and acquisition, and improved print volumes.
The InfoTrends seminar then had a succession of Indigo printers from around the world tell their stories. They were all different but had common threads, including a drive to succeed, and open mind, an innovative approach, a strong marketing ethos and a commitment to excellence.
