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f you had to pick someone, Robert Burton for the past five years has easily been the most influential person on the North American printing industry, beginning with the creation of Quebecor World (now struggling for the past three years) and his subsequent business dealings around Moore, Wallace (the prelude to today's RR Donnelley), Creo (bought by Kodak) and Cenveo, where he is now CEO.
In 2006, Burton's influence continued through his hostile takeover attempt of Banta. In the end, RR Donnelley's CEO Mark Angelson picks up Banta, but Burton has single-handedly been responsible for decreasing the capacity of some of the largest printers in North America. Agree with his tactics or not, Burton is the driving force amid printing's power elite.
VistaPrint, on the other hand, is 2006's best example of strategic influence on the future of small- to medium-sized printers, built around the rise of template-based printing. IN just over four years, Vistaprint has amassed an astounding 8-million customers worldwide. Underneath the technology it uses to handle some 12,000 print orders per day, VistaPrint has secured 14 patents (now 15 since PrintAction went to press) based on order processing and gang-run printing that could stall the industry-wide adoption of Web-to-print through commercial, customer-facing templates.
T
he year 2006 also presented an unprecedented swing among top technology providers who believe ink is the black-gold consumable of printing future. While it will still take several years for printing plates to lose revenue-generation influence, companies like Agfa, Canon, EFI, Fujifilm, Kodak, Screen and Xaar made several interesting moves to gain a strategic advantage via inkjet. Seiko, through its Epson subsidiary and dozens of important inkjet OEMs, is strongly positioned for the future of inkjet - not to mention its display prowess, both LCD and flexible. The vendor of 2006, however, is clearly HP in terms of its ability to affect the direction of printing, well beyond its Indigo success - if it can stay committed and not allow digital photography and computing to steer it decidedly deeper into the consumer marketplace.
In Canada, HP's Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) exceeded revenue by 112 percent, year over year, installed 19 HP Indigo 5000s, and generated 74.7 percent growth in what it calls high-value printed pages off the Indigo platform (with VistaPrint holding unlimited page potential in its new 15-Indigo-machine juggernaut).
A month ago, HP commercially released the first incarnation of Edgeline, a page-wide-array system currently built on Vivera ink (10,560 scalable printhead nozzles) and laser technology. Edgeline foreshadows a process that will eat into high-value offset and digital pages. Several vendors are chasing page-wide-array in which the paper moves instead of the printhead (speed). The big win is ink as a consumable. HP's Imaging and Printing Group has 7,000 patents and over 400 of those are dedicated to inks and printheads.
Read the full story in the December 2006 edition of PrintAction |
