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  Digital Printing in Western Europe: Where is it Headed?

Digital Production Printing: Who’s Printing Where?

A key question for digital print service providers is where print jobs will be printed over the next few years. Digital printing is performed in many different environments, but a major differentiation can be made between office/workgroup printing and production/commercial printing. Printing solely for one’s own purposes requires a different set of skills, applications, and devices than professionally producing prints for others. 

As Workgroup devices are becoming more affordable and capable, new players are emerging in the outsourcing market. Commercial and in-plant printers are striving to become more efficient and regain customers. 

 Figure 1: Percentage of Jobs to be Handled by Printing Facilities in the Next 3 Years

The Figure above indicates a small shift towards office printing and outsourced corporate printing and away from traditional print providers. Commercial printers are seeing a less-than-average proportion of jobs printed within offices and expect only a small shift towards office/workgroup printing. 

In-house and quick printers already see a higher share of jobs being printed in the Workgroup and also expect that share to increase over the next few years. Commercial printers expect a strong rise in outsourcing, which is also the only area that data processing printers see a significant increase. On the other hand, quick printers expect fewer jobs to be outsourced. 

The Colour Craze

The bulk of today’s digital printing is still produced in black & white, but there has recently been a noticeable shift towards more colour in digital printing. The Universal colour devices in the office environment are driving this shift. As shown in the Figure below, survey participants expect their demand for colour printing to increase over the next 3 years, and half of them believe that black & white will account for less than 30% of their jobs in 3 years.

 Figure 2:  Percentage of Jobs Expected to be Black & White (vs. Colour) in 3 Years

Printers are seeing their portfolios of print applications expanding rather than shrinking. Marketing material remains the most popular colour print product, and over 50% of respondents from all types of print service providers expected this application to be one of the most important in the future. Direct mail also ranked high, and was especially popular among digital print specialists. Meanwhile, quick printers were more reluctant to view this as a major application.

Office-related print products like general business/office, presentations, and business cards/forms/labels also rank relatively high on the list. There is also a trend to produce more of these products on demand and in colour. Eventually, the achievable volume in this area will remain more limited than print volumes created by advertising or publication-related applications.

The preceding is an excerpt from InfoTrends/CAP Ventures’ research report entitled The Future of the Document. The complete document is available immediately. To learn more about the report or to make a purchase, please contact Alison Hipp at (781) 616-2100, ext. 126 or alison_hipp@capv.com.

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