Tag: print

Printer market rebounds

Posted on February 8, 2023 by - News

The printer market has bounced back after being gutted by the pandemic.

The latest quarterly analysis of the printer market across Western Europe in the fourth quarter, from Context, shows that printer sales had a good ending in 2022 as marketing campaigns drove higher-end products.

Context said that revenues and volumes of sales exceeded expectations.

The analyst found there was a 12.3 per cent year-on-year increase in unit sales and a 27.8 per cent increase in revenue during the period for printer hardware. There were also efforts on the consumer side to get entry-level stock shifting through distie warehouses more quickly.

Epson goes on the road

Posted on October 3, 2018 by - News

banner_220x220Epson is bringing its Reseller Roadshow to the UK and Ireland between 2 October and 22  November 2018, to showcase its latest range of print, projection and scan products and solutions. The programme will also feature insights from world-class guest speakers on a range of different subject areas that impact the channel.

The Reseller Roadshow, which will visit five different cities across England, Ireland and Scotland, will outline the power of business inkjet technology, where Epson says it has seen an enormous growth in sales in the last 12 months. Attendees will learn how making the switch from laser to inkjet can deliver significant value to the channel – driving the shift to make print a contractual, and not transactional, business.

Joining the roadshow as a guest speaker is print industry expert and thought leader, Mick Heys, Vice President, European Imaging, Printing and Document Solutions (IPDS) at IDC. Mr Heys will be at each roadshow event, delivering his views about print industry trends and the evolving IPDS landscape.

The roadshow will highlight why size matters in projection and how document management – which Epson thinks is of utmost importance in today’s compliancy landscape – is made easy with its Document Capture Suite.

The agenda also focuses heavily on CSR trends and the many opportunities these present for the channel. Attendees will find out how inkjet printing can help keep both costs and energy emissions down – Epson has found that companies could save up to £157 million on their energy bill and 333,041 metric tons of CO2 emissions in Europe over four years, as a result of opting for inkjet over laser[1].

Leo Johnson, Head of PwC’s Disruption practice, and presenter of Radio 4’s flagship series FutureProofing, will also join the Reseller Roadshow to discuss how CSR is reshaping business and society.

Darren Phelps, Executive Director Europe – Value Partner Channel for Epson Europe, said: “We are dedicated to offering businesses across Europe cost-effective and efficient technology that is better for the environment. An example of this in action are the advances we’ve made in inkjet technology, which uses up to 96 percent less energy, produces up to 92 per cent less CO2, and achieves up to 99 oer cent less waste than laser technology.

More information about, and registration for, the Reseller Roadshow events – which take place in London (2  October), Coventry (18 October), Manchester (25 October), Edinburgh (13 November) and Dublin (22 November) – is available here.

 

Heidelberg has new cunning plan

Posted on June 8, 2017 by - News

cunning-planPrint outfit Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, better known as Heidelberg has been talking about its coming print sector plans.

The company’s Management Board is presenting ‘Heidelberg goes digital!’ – a package of measures for the years ahead with a strategic focus on technology leadership, digital transformation and lots of other buzzwords.

To be fair the company has been doing well with a successful turnaround with a return to sustained profitability, Heidelberg now says it wants continuous growth – but then again who doesn’t?

Group sales of around €3 billion are being targeted with a large number of specific measures in the period to 2022. The company has set its sights on a further significant improvement in profitability, with EBITDA of €250 to 300 million and a net profit after taxes of over €100 million.

Sales in financial year 2016/17 were just over €2.5 billion, EBITDA at €179 million and the net result after taxes at €36 million.

Company’s CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer said that during the next five years, Heidelberg will once again become a leading light in the sector, enjoying strong growth and profits.

“We’ve defined the relevant success factors and have already introduced initial measures. This marks the start of a new era of growth for Heidelberg,” he said.

The glorious five-year plan involves playing a pioneering role in digitization (Simply Smart/Smart Print Shop) with its Push to Stop concept and also in industrial digital printing for the packaging market with the Labelfire and Primefire product lines. The company thinks it can double the market share in digital printing from the current level of less than five percent to as high as ten percent and generate additional sales potential amounting to around €200 million in the period to 2022.

Money is to be made in digital transformation, including the digitisation and integration of the previously separate areas of equipment, software, services, and consumables with straightforward, transparent pricing of all offerings for customers.

“The entire work process at the customer’s print shop will be addressed from a single source using a single e-commerce sales platform. This will reduce complexity and costs for customers while also boosting their productivity,” Hundsdörfer said.

The aim here for Heidelberg over the next five years is to increase the company’s market share for consumables from the current level of five percent to just under 10 percent while also leveraging additional sales potential of €250 million.

Part of this strategy is the takeover of Fujifilm’s coatings and pressroom chemicals business in the EMEA region, which represents a sales volume of some €25 million. It will take effect as of July 1, 2017.

Heidelberg is using this takeover to expand in the attractive growth segment for consumables. The transaction is another step in pursuing the company’s growth strategy of developing a fully comprehensive cross-sector portfolio that is geared toward specific customer requirements and also further strengthens Heidelberg’s market position for coatings and pressroom chemicals.

Equistone buys a slice of print services outfit Apogee

Posted on September 6, 2016 by - News

history-of-print-16th-century-printing-companyManaged print and document services outfit Apogee has woken up and found a big chunk of itself has been bought by private equity investor Equistone Partners Europe.

Maidstone-headquartered Apogee employs around 450 staff across 14 offices in the UK and mainland Europe selling hardware and managed services on kit from Canon, Xerox, Konica Minolta and Kyocera.

The Apogee founders Jason Collins and Robin Stanton-Gleaves will stay in charge but Equistone’s minions Steve O’Hare and Andrew Backen will join the board. Equistone’s cash means that the company is valued at £185m, the parties said.

Money raised from sale will be used to fund an expansion programme.

Apogee sells its services to the likes of McDonalds, which bought a print infrastructure and managed service, as well as fashion label Ted Baker, PC maker Dell and BDO.

It is doing quite well. In 2014, Apogee turned over £66.1 million and reported operating profit of £7.47 million. In 2015 the firm bought fellow print managed print services business Balreed Group.

 

Boffins print memory onto paper

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

postitA group of researchers from Taiwan has emerged from smoke filled labs with a method that uses ink-jet technology to print working memory on an ordinary piece of paper.

If the invention takes off then electronics printed on paper could could lead to applications such as smart labels on foods and pharmaceuticals or as wearable medical sensors.

While engineers have managed to print transistors and solar cells on paper, in the past, they have been unable to do memory.

Paper is made of fibre making it difficult to lay down the thin, uniform layers of materials that typical memory technologies need.

To get around this problem, the team, led by Ying-Chih Liao, Si-Chen Lee, and Jr-Hau He of National Taiwan University decided to build resistive random access memory (RRAM), a relatively new type of memory with a structure simple enough to cope with such surface variations.

In an RRAM device, an insulator can be set to different levels of electrical resistance by applying a voltage across it; one level of resistance corresponds to the 1s of digital logic, the other to the 0s. So each bit in RRAM consists of an insulator sandwiched by two electrodes.

The device was built with silver, titanium dioxide, and carbon, although other combinations of a metal, an insulator, and a conductor could be used. They started by using a screen-printing process to coat a carbon paste onto the paper to form the bottom electrode. The process was repeated 10 times to reduce roughness, then the coated paper was cured at 100 °C for 10 minutes in a vacuum.

Ink was made by mixing TiO2 nanoparticles in acetyl acetone and used an ink-jet printer to deposit a layer of the particles on top of the carbon, where it would act as the insulator. Once that dried, the researchers used a solution of ethylene glycol and water containing silver nanoparticles, and they printed silver dots on top of the TiO2 layer to serve as top electrodes.

The memory paper was robust and could be bent at least 1,000 times with no degradation in performance.