Challenges within European Production Print Market Remain Despite Imaging Industry Evolution
When I dipped my toes into the vast sea of printing more than two decades ago, names such as Nipson, Siemens Nixdorf, Xerox, Scitex, and HP dominated the production print market. We traveled to their sites in Namur, Poing, and Dusseldorf, as if to find the Holy Grail.
It was a somewhat of exclusive club of experts migrating from line printing to all points addressable, experimenting with not just with printing data from a database or a host environment, such as AS400, in a 1:1 modus, but also adding dynamic elements to the look and feel of documents such as invoices, statements, and marketing pieces. Pioneers such as PrintSoft Systems and GMC provided “sophisticated” programming, and a bit later, using WYSIWYG software tools, “manipulating” data as required. Mind you, today, any average word processor tool and spreadsheet application can achieve similar results.
From Geek to Normal
Those pioneers are still around, but only as part of a long line of mergers and acquisitions amongst substantial global players. As a result, brand names have disappeared, technologies have advanced, and what used to fill a huge manufacturing hall can now fit into a small partition of it. What used to be exotic and exorbitantly expensive has become the output standard: color. And where paper used to be the limit of one’s productivity, today, the fantasy and object of one’s dreams are just the beginning (just thinking of Scodix’s coatings, Xerox’s printing to objects, and EFI’s print-your-whole-home interior).
Variable data printing or transactional printing are now the standards, not just for paper output but also for multi- or omnichannel delivery. Some even top it with dynamic augmented reality. If you can program it, you can communicate it. And where futurists forecasted print is dead, in particular for emerging generations, millennials are starting to appreciate print again””that is, if it’s high quality.
Just like software and hardware pioneers have seen mergers and acquisitions over the past two decades, print services providers are now facing the same challenges. They’re strategizing to remain relevant, competitive, and to win the race.
The Game is Afoot
Technology advances at a never-seen speed, customers demand better quality at more competitive pricing, finishing can do anything, packaging at a one-fits-all level is history. This all comes at a high price. As production print returns inhouse in many organizations, everyday print services providers file for bankruptcy. In the hope to survive, they are looking for investors (a.k.a., crowd-funding), putting themselves up for sale, or engaging in yet another merger.
Don’t Panic, It’s Only Brexit
In Europe, notably in the U.K., more headaches for the printing industry lie ahead due to Brexit. We’re used to doing business across borders day in, day out. The European Union regulations allow you to sell and purchase goods across all 28 countries without restrictions, added import/export tariffs, etc. And we’re all used to outsourcing, and nearshoring services, i.e., fulfillment to wherever it works best for our wallets.
The printing industry is part of this open market. And this is where it already starts hitting some U.K. PSPs Print Service Providers, as it is still unclear how business between the U.K. and the rest of Europe will work after March 2019.
Not Light, but No Complete Darkness Yet
There’s still hope to survive a couple more years as an industry, and just like in the office imaging world, paperless is still a ways off. What’s commonly known as digital transformation is undeniably a trend in production print with web-toprint, management information systems (MIS), augmented reality, and apps for remote job management and monitoring. All of these currently work in favor of print, rather than against it. As new retro-trends surface, such as going back to paper-based books, perhaps leading to the printing of books on demand, who knows what other retro printing applications may reemerge?
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