C. Clint Bolte & Associates

Nearly 180 attendees gathered at McCormick Place for the traditional day-before-Graph Expo briefing on industry technology, trends, and Must See 'ems products to highlight the largest print equipment trade show in North America. Hosted by NPES, organized and moderated by Bill Lamparter, Principal of the PrintCom Consultancy, this seventh annual fete drew the largest contingent of foreign guests yet with twenty percent of the attendees visiting from a dozen different countries.

The Conference's main sessions focused on the economy's impact on print, staffing for the new technology, a series of technology vignettes providing the latest information on the newest technologies, and an in-depth review of the DRUPA 2004 generation of sheetfed presses, ink developments, and the 21st century bindery. Afternoon breakout sessions followed up with a series of practical "How to" plan for, organize, and implement the chosen technology.

Kip Smythe, NPES' Vice President and Director of Member Services, offered a keynote presentation on how print fits in the changing economic landscape. Under Mr. Smythe's supervision, NPES conducts annually over $325,000 of original market research identifying major trends in the printing, publishing, and converting industries and their impact upon its supplier members. This research provided much of the authoritative background to Kip's presentation.

NPES' long time consulting economist, Mr. Mike Evans, forecasts US economic growth to slow to 3% in 2005 and 2% in 2006 following the more aggressive 3.25 % bounce back experienced this year. Publishing revenues as reported for PIB measured magazines are up, but page count is down and run lengths continue to slide. This trend is confirmed in the National Association of Printing Ink Manufacturers (NAPIM) statistics that show ink volumes topped out in 2000 and have been falling since. Kip commented that the NAPIM figures do not include toner usage as a reflection of the growth in digital print because toner in used in both office as well as printing plant applications. However, with digital print barely 10% of total print, this downward trend of ink tonnage would not be altered significantly.

Strategies for Management forecast the number of printing companies is to continue to diminish by about a thousand firms a year down to 23,500 through 2007. Some will come from bankruptcies and part from mergers and acquisitions, as medium sized firms will look to "tuck in" smaller regional competitors as well as the conventional lithographic print segment of corporate in-plants. Many in-plants continue to focus their resources and expertise on developing and offering digital capabilities while outsourcing the more capital-intensive conventional printing. Venture capitalists are looking for under-valued targets as well.

The difficulty in forecasting overall print sales growth, even short term, was highlighted by the difference in the 2005 forecast from the two print trade association economists who clearly follow printing most closely. NAPL expects print sales to come in between +3.2-4.1% in '04 and +4.0-5.0% in '05 while PIA is about half that rosy projection at +2.2% and +2.0% respectively.

Kip gave a specific example of how associations are using multi-media to the detriment of print. He said, "Two thousand copies of the International Color Consortium 2003-2004 Progress Report were printed while over 12,000 PDFs of that same report have been downloaded off the Association website."

Printers have been diversifying into other non-print graphic communications services for several years now. PIA says that these ancillary services amount to 7.3% of total revenues while NAPL pegs that figure at 7.8% with expectations that this number will nearly double to 14.5% by 2007. Smythe concluded that printers are redefining the businesses that they are in by reassessing their entire product/service offering, "unbundling" previous services built into their overhead costs, and actually creating new services.

Rick Littrell, Principal of MagiComm Consultancy and Moderator of the Vignettes panel, set the stage by suggesting that the industry's data-centric print production workflows have made in-house information technology (IT) expertise mission critical. These IT professionals should have computer science training, strong understanding of networks, storage technologies, and database software applications. Instead of additional duties responsibilities being assigned to the electronic prepress supervisor, this position is becoming a core competency for even medium sized printers.

Don Goldman, Senior Project Manager for MIS supplier Prism-USA, in his vignette on management information systems advocated, "For JDF and integration to full payoff, management must (1) establish a computer assisted printflow that uses the estimate/plan to direct, communicate, and manage jobs through the plant, (2) use MIS to schedule and monitor jobs and production activities, and (3) has the discipline and commitment to make their print management system the system of record."

Joerg Daehnhardt, Heidelberg's Director of Small Format Press Product Management, gave a capsulization of the direct imaging presses. From the 1991 introduction of the first GTO-DI, there are now fourteen different commercial models on the market from eight manufacturers. From a single plate cartridge source there are now several competitive plate cartridge suppliers.