We’re proud to bring you our latest print industry predictions. This is one of our most popular features and we’re very thankful to all of this year’s contributors.
You may notice our print industry predictions have a multi-media theme for 2020. We know the way people consume information continues to evolve and we want to provide you with options.
Enjoy this year’s collection of print industry predictions!
Rock LaManna
LaManna Alliance
Buyers, Sellers, and Growth in the Print Industry
Buyers: The focus will be on 2020 and beyond. Chemistry, understanding the business, and having the credibility to even have a potential seller talk to you, are things that are very important.
The opportunities are going to be tremendous due to aging baby boomers. But you need to be prepared. Look to build up your credentials, your experience, your knowledge, and your personal and company reputation.
Buyers will be focused on multiples, valuations, and due diligence. Be prepared for a lot of competition from private equity, family offices, and strategic buyers. They’re all looking at the industry and consolidation is abundant.
Sellers: You must understand where you stand today, as a brand. You need to start looking at your exit plan, your succession plans, as well as your personal and career goals.
What do you plan on doing after the sale? Don’t wait too long. Start looking at it now, as well as 12 months, 24 months, and 36 months in the future.
Print owners really need look at all the information about selling their businesses. And once you start doing that, get the right advisors to help you decide which way to go, what time to sell, and be prepared for due diligence. Be prepared for the ups and downs of the journey and the difficulty, of not only selling your business, but also your post-transaction phase.
Growth: It’s risky, as there’s a tremendous amount of competition. You’re basically competing with another 3,000 printers, who are thinking about whether they should buy, grow, or sell.
For growth, understand what it’s going to take to succeed. What are the resources you’ll need? What is your opportunity to really compete in today’s marketplace? You might decide to sell, look at a successor, or consider a partner. There are a lot of choices.
You must have a plan, a commitment, and look at your 12, 24, and 36 month transition. And ultimately, think about where you will be in 10 years.
Ford Bowers
Specialty Graphic Imaging Association President & CEO
Print Gets a Second Look
My personal opinion, is that print is coming more back into vogue with people who may have left it, for what they thought were greener pastures. Those pastures were probably not as green as they imagined.
It’s very difficult to quantify results there. Print is much more quantifiable in terms of results, in terms of marketing.
And I think that what we’re seeing now is, I wouldn’t say it’s a groundswell but I think when it comes to print as a medium for lead generation and sales, people are giving us a second look. I think that’s going to continue.
But I don’t see a sea change in that attitude, yet. One of the things that we’re working with, is Brands United, which is to really bring the brands in and to educate and remind them about the value proposition that print has and has always had.
And then of course, the NAPCO Media acquisition helps us with that because they have a tremendous footprint in those areas as well. They are people that talk to the brand side.
One of the things that we will be doing, is trying to develop programs and opportunities to reinforce that message, so that print takes its rightful place, along the constellation of other channels, in an omni-channel era. So, I would say that would be my one prediction that we will probably have some more people coming back home, as it were.
Jens Brusgaard
CompanyXchange BV LabelCompaniesForSale.com
Watch the Smaller Companies
Although it may be getting more difficult to fund deals in 2020 (particularly in the US) I don’t see the M&A activity level in the packaging sector and more specifically in labels dropping significantly, as there are still Private Equity (PE) firms out here looking to get into the sector and others pushing for significant expansion in the companies that they initially invested in in the last 2-3 years.
There will however be a move to smaller deals, as many of the companies fitting the acquisition target profiles of the PE firms have already been sold.
I currently see PE firms actively targeting smaller companies that they would not have bothered to look at even recently. Even for a first acquisition in the sector that seems to be the case.
For me the main driver of lower level of transactions (at least in Europe and if it happens at all) would be lack of sufficient sellers more than lack of funding or risk appetite on the buyers side.
For the time being it also looks as if the PE firms trying to flip the larger groups they have built over the last 5-7 years are having no problems finding buyers at acceptable multiples. That may start to change though if lenders become more cautious.
On the whole I do however think that 2020 will be a good year for M&A, particularly in the smaller deal segment as there is still too much money chasing too few opportunities.
Frazer Chesterman
FM Future
What’s Ahead for Digital Inkjet
I think there are three areas that are particularly interesting for digital inkjet for the print industry. I think there’s three areas in particular are:
- Packaging.
- Decor
- And I think, possibly the third one is going to be what I would term as kind of textile application.
Those are the three interesting markets where you’re seeing growth, you’re seeing development.
Clearly, in the kind of label packaging market, corrugated market there’s opportunity. Clearly in the decor, in the kind of wallpaper, flooring, in those areas, there’s an opportunity.
As brands get it and as brands start to understand the opportunity of doing short run, production, they’ll see the opportunity with print. And I think therefore there’s something there.
And then finally I think the textile market is really interesting and growing, particularly the sort of evolution of soft signage into new and interesting applications.
So it could be fabric for fashion, but it’s less likely to be clothing. More likely to be fashion items in decoration. In hotels or in bars or restaurants.
They are my three of nuggets of opportunity.
Isabelle Marelly
Massivit 3D
3D Printing Evolution
The relationship between the brands and the PSPs have changed a lot. Brands are looking for partnerships and not just people who will execute only what they are asking for. And the brands are now making data driven decisions, omni-channel marketing, and so on.
They don’t develop a campaign and decide to do it all over the world in the same way.
They are looking for partnerships, where they can get like the advice and use all the new technologies. And they are really relying on their partners to bring them these new technologies.
On the other hand, you have the PSPs that are struggling with low margins and accommodation. They are looking for new ideas and new technologies and new offering to offer to their customers.
With 3D printing, we have developed lots of new applications, especially large format 3D printing. And our customers have developed new applications that can compete with the others.
You can mix combinations of 2D and 3D in posters. And instead of having a square SCG frame, you can print it in the shape you want.
Then you compete with the others that cannot do that because square self-signage is boring now. Everything that is in motion is very trendy. So you have like the splash of milk, coming out of a bottle.
You can create anything you can imagine, the limitation being your imagination. I think that combining all the technology can bring you to another step, another level.
Kevin Karstedt
Karstedt Partners
What Speed Now Means
The downside of of digital print was always that it was slow. And on the roll to roll side and the label side, a press running at 30 or 40 or 60 feet a minute or 100 feet a minute or 150 feet, was always too slow because my analog press can run at 300 or 600 or 800 feet a minute.
So everybody was always equating, really apples and oranges to speed and throughput.
Same thing happened on the offset side. Where a press might be doing a couple thousand sheets an hour versus the analog press doing 1,800 or 18,000 or 20,000 sheets an hour.
It was always this catch 22 that it’s not fast enough. The aha moment I had was related to a digital benchmark study that Jeff Wettersten and I are doing. (The benchmark study can now be accessed through this link.)
Basically a benchmark study is a study that gauges, the temperature of the industry, at a given point, and then again six months later, and six months later, and six months later. And so you get to see what the change is, up or down or whatever.
We’re getting ready to do this for the corrugated market for displays and cartons for single pass and multi-pass operations.
Anyway, what we what we realized is that companies are now, and I use the words, “mature enough,’ but it means that it’s not on the negative side. It means that they’ve come to the realization that it’s no longer about throughput speed. It’s no longer about the speed of the press and how fast it can it can print.
It’s more about the speed in which you can get jobs executed. Getting jobs through the plant is the important number to start thinking about, or to recognize, not how fast the linear speed is of my press
People are starting to get that or have have grown to get that. And that was the aha moment that Jeff and I had, that the industry is there. We need to help to propagate that. It’s no longer the issue.
Print quality is a given. People are satisfied with the print quality that is coming off digital presses now. It’s how does it integrate into the plant. How does it save time down the road through the production process?
And it’s not that there are issues with it. But the main issue is being able to do it. So that’s the aha moment I had. And it relates particularly to the corrugated sector but it also relates back to the other sectors of package production, folding cartons, labels in particular.
Ken Hanulec
EFI
The Need for Speed & Change
We’re reaching some of the physical limits of what you can do in terms of acceleration and deceleration. We’re reaching some of the physical limits, with where are you can have absolute drop placement accuracy.
And I think it’s just a evolution of the technology that you’re not going to move things faster. The heads will only fire, a certain firing rate.
So I think the answer is single pass technology, where the prints flow under the print heads, drops fall under the sheet. We can put them exactly where I need them and I think it’s just a winning architecture at the end of the day.
I want to be clear that there’s still a big home for all that shuttle based technology. I’m talking a little bit about in the future, 10 years out when everything would move to single pass. You’re starting to see that now have a thing with technologies and of course, all of our industrial buildings material products.
Melissa Jones
Graphics Arts Association
Discover Collaboration
My prediction for the printing industry in 2020 would be collaboration, becoming united. And what I mean by that is actually working very closely with each other together to produce an ultimate product for your clients, rather than competing with each other on our distributed price.
I also see people being kind of the ultimate consultant for their clients, where it’s going to be the end to end product. Not only the actual printed piece but also how to get it marketed effectively. How to get your most value in return. How to get out and mail for most the impact.
Things you can incorporate it into your marketing machine again to get that ROI for everything involved, get the message across effectively.
Mark Geeves
Color-Logic
Don’t Forget Design
I think in our industry, we’re going to see more influence from the designer and the brand. We’re probably one of the few industries that, in the past, basically has told printers, brand managers and designers, “Oh give us our file and we will take care of it.”
Well that’s gone away. When you look at cars, when you look at buildings, when you look at all the other industries, it’s all being influenced by design. And that’s the future of print.
Design is going to take more and more power. And as they learn more about what we can do today in print, our industry is going to grow.
This is the first time we’ve attended the Printing United show, and everything is about embellishments and differentiation, So once you learn about print today is how can you differentiate yourself from your competition?
That’s what brands are looking for. That’s what printers are wanting to provide. And that’s what us as manufacturers, here at the show. are trying to do. It’s about taking it beyond CMYK and adding value back into print.
Gabriel Hernandez
Florida Graphics Alliance
Consider the Power of Healthcare
We’re working on healthcare. We’re leveraging membership across a lot of our states, and we’re working on providing health care to our members.
The cost of healthcare is going up every year by double digits, and by leveraging across all of our membership groups, we’re able to go to the healthcare providers, as a large company, 10,000 of lives, and really reduce the cost of healthcare. It’s not just initially but reduce the costs, year over year.
The increases are really what’s affecting a lot of our printer members. That’s one of the big things we’re doing for next year, for our members.
We’re continuing to bring cost saving measures for them, credit card processing, business insurance, and a lot of other things that really to help them reduce costs. Let’s face it, the margins are getting thinner and we need to keep bringing value to our members.
We feel that it’s an important part of a company to provide health care to their employees. It’s going to help them bring better employees. It’s going to help retain their employees.
And for us, as a membership organization, it’s going to help us retain members and it’s going to help us add new membership, which in turn will help us bring better services, help us have better events, and help us leverage even more so down the road with other things.
David Monto
National Print Owners Association
Shifting Marketplace Needs
I see things moving more towards packaging, labeling, signage. A lot of the print shops are getting into the sign business and that’s growing. All the different substrates, the flooring, big wall banners.
And packaging is getting to be really big. Because it’s providing… all of those small businesses need to put their items in a package. So they need boxes. That that’s getting to be a trend that we’re seeing more of.
Print isn’t dead but it’s shifting.
George Compiani
CET Color
Reinventing Solutions
The trend is automation efficiencies and the ability to address print requests at a short amount of time. The technology keeps getting faster, better, less expensive.
It’s much more critical to be able to address print opportunities in a short amount of time. So, it has to be cost effective, high quality, with minimal turnaround times.
The other thing that seems to be a strong trend is that everything is leaning towards inkjet. The quality is increasing, while the cost of equipment is, again, going down.
It’s a higher tech solutions for less costs, and much more robust solutions.
Mackenzi Farsheed
MindFire
Get Strategic with Your Social Media
If you are a business owner or a sales and marketing professional, you must be posting on LinkedIn, all the time. Let me tell you why. Just like Facebook was 10 years ago, there’s something called organic reach. So supply and demand is basically what’s going on.
In LinkedIn right now. There is a lot of demand, meaning, tons of eyeballs, tons of audience, and not enough supply of content. So what happens for the people who are posting content, is that the reach of your content, is going far beyond your followers.
For example, have 800 followers on LinkedIn. I posted an article, two weeks ago now, my article has been seen 83,000 times. That’s what organic reach means. That means that if your article is valuable and people engage with it, LinkedIn rewards you by showing that article to a wide variety of people, 83,000 in my case.
If you’re trying to get in front of people, get on LinkedIn, start engaging with other people’s posts. That means comments and “like” them. Not just selfish marketing. You can’t just post about stuff that you want to promote. You have to actually engage, in a genuine way, with other people’s posts. Then LinkedIn starts to see that you’re engaged with their platform.
Beyond engaging, I want you to post every day, multiple times. I want you to hashtag it. Let’s say if you’re talking about workout gear, you talk about workouts.
Then I want you to create articles on LinkedIn. Essentially it’s a blog post native within LinkedIn. LinkedIn likes that because it gets more people staying in their platform.
No matter what you’re doing, I’m telling you, get on LinkedIn right now, it will help you do whatever you’re doing better.
Tim Greene
IDC
Understanding the Impact of Convergence
Definitely the theme of this event has been about convergence. Clearly we’re seeing that with the design of a lot of these systems today. We see a lot more tools and systems that are designed to be easier to use, whether it’s cutting systems or printing systems,. They’re much easier to use.
That’s going to enable more of that convergence, as more of these companies get into, participate, and compete in the large format side of the graphics business.
That’s going to have an impact, all the way through, from the customer, the buyer, to the channel, into the manufacturer. They have to be much more effective in terms of figuring out which applications to use and what are the key growth areas. That’s what I think is going to be the key thing for 2020.
Jeff Peterson
Foil and Specialty Effects Association
Digital Foil Enjoys Continued Growth
From the finishing and decorating side, we think there’s still a lot of growth opportunity for our members of FSEA and people involved in this process.
Digital foil continues to grow. And that’s both toner based and polymer based adhesives, where they’re applying foil to the adhesives for shorter runs.
And what’s happened with the digital foil, its popularity has helped our regular members who are doing more conventional foil stamping. And because people are seeing a lot of metallic decoration, they’re really liking it. We just think that area is going to continue to move forward.
Cold foils are another area that’s growing.
One of the things we did that’s come out recently is The Foil Cheat Sheet. It shows examples of all the different foil processes.
So an end user or somebody that’s interested in metallic foil can choose the process that they want, whether it’s cold foil, hot foil, digital foil, or foil substrate. It’s a great reference tool. If you’re interested in it, you can go they have www.fsea.com and order one of our Foil Cheat Sheets.
George Promis & Kimberly Villwock
Diversified Nano Solutions Corporation
Ink is a Security Solution
We think the security area, of course, is growing. Unfortunately, there’s more counterfeiting, and there’s more fraud happening in the world. So we’re coming up with material sets of things to promote security.
We see this being really useful in a variety of different industries, whether that be the printing industry, whether it’s cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, or apparel. We really see this pretty much in any industry you can think of that suffering from counterfeiting, which to my knowledge seems to be almost all of them.
All brand owners say they need this and want this and we’re trying to bridge that gap between the brand owners and who does their backroom work, whether it be in in printing or in manufacturing or development. They can put these fluids or inks onto their products.
The brands are all very interested because they have so much counterfeiting they have so many problems with fraud.
We can either add our additive to inks or fluids, that can be sprayed onto products. You can mark your item to go directly on the item itself or it can be added onto the packaging. We really leave a lot of room for flexibility for brand owners to decide what they want to incorporate.
Vince Mallardi
The Printing Brokerage/Buyers Association International
Get Ready for 2030
If you look in terms of 2030, the volume of print related or image related materials is going to be significantly larger. You only hear it here.
Everybody is saying, “Oh, the industry’s going downhill and we’re losing market share, to the Internet.”
The Internet? The Internet has actually helped the printing industry, in reality. It certainly helped Vistaprint, and many of the promotional products people. And consumer to print, which is something that never even existed before.
Printers weren’t looking after individual customers. Individual customers didn’t spend any money on printing. They bought magazines. They bought products and services from other people like Office Max or whatever.But now, they’re seeing that change.
However, the profit margins are still going to be in the under 5% range. And from an investment standpoint, that’s not good.
By 2030, we will be at 400 billion times the computing power we now have. What are the consequences of it? They’re more than any of us could even begin to understand.
With such computing capability we will be in a position to have not just virtual reality.
And we’re not going to need as many people working. We have 3-4% unemployment now and a lot of people say, “Well that’s really 14% because they’re underemployed because they’re working at Walmart for eight bucks an hour.”
Be that as it may, the fact is that with the computing power that we’re talking about 10 years from now, robotics will be able to emerge into every part of our human life.
We’ll have intelligent kitchen products that will prepare food. We’ll have a three dimensional printer that can make ham sandwiches.
We’ll have a lot of things, the beginning of that period that are just unthinkable right now but we’re also going to have 50% unemployment.
Let’s face it, we’re not all created equal. I mean, that sounds great. Philosophically and politically, but there are some smart people, very smart people, not so smart, and some very dumb at the other end. And what are we going to do with these people within a warehouse them, or are we going to stop procreation?
Arthur Abbott
Abbott Communications Group
Think Automation
Our main thing is automation. Try to be able to do things faster, quicker, less expensive. We need to try to reduce the amount of touches on pieces and anything we can do to try to be
to sell the product to a customer at the same price but make more profit. That helps us a lot.
Joseph Lyman
Great Lakes Graphics Association
Watch UV Inkjet
I definitely believe the UV inkjet is going to take over the market. It’s certainly growing leaps and bounds every single year.
In fact, I just saw one of our member companies that is replacing quite a bit of their lithographic sheetfed on a UV inkjet craft. I think UV inkjets will definitely be a huge success in 2020.
Digital finishing. I think digital finishing and then binding, definitely it’s going to continue to grow as well.
People are looking for more automation, obviously, with the need to figure out how they’re going to be able to replace bodies. We’re having a lot of people retire now.
And so I think digital finishing, digital binary, anything that can help individuals, be able to automate more their process and workflows. I think those trends will continue to increase in 2020.
Steve Bonoff
Printing Industry Midwest
Is Your Data Private?
I would say data privacy and the managing of your customer’s data and how we’re managing it is going to be a top issue in 2020.
That’s something that might not be on a lot of people’s radar today. I think it’s going to be in 2020.
Don Hartford
Reece Supply Company
Embracing Cause Marketing
Printers for the Cure obviously draws people into our booth. That’s a good thing. It’s created a different level of relationships. Existing customers, partners we’ve had for years came over and said, “Oh, this is great!” And the stories they tell us. Everybody knows a survivor and has a deep hearted story.
The marketing brought us closer to existing customers that we didn’t know and then brought a lot of new people that never stopped here, that stopped in because of the cause.
And we’re able to talk about other things. Cause marketing, it’s a win-win. It’s a win-win for everybody.
We were planning our Printing United booth and we’ve all been touched, either personally or by somebody we know, that’s fought cancer. We thought since Printing United was going to be in October, it made perfect sense to do something to help the cause.
So we contacted our vendors. We had a phenomenal response from the 3Ms, Mimakis, Canons of the world that came in and said, “What can we do to help?”
And they chipped in and we just said, “How much pink can we can we create?”
We decked out our booth in pink and then we started selling T-shirts, donated by 3M, with the proceeds going to the cause.
And for every piece of equipment we have at the show, Mr. Reece agreed to sponsor them. So for example, for a unit we sell, that’s $500 we donate.
And everything we sell at Printing United has got a dollar amount that the Reece family donates to the cause, the Susan G. Komen Foundation. We have some ballasts and some LEDs that we’ve been selling all month, and a percentage of the proceeds go to the cause.
We’re real proud of the project. When we told our group of 14 about it, there was an excitement you could feel. Everybody knew that we have an opportunity to make a difference. It’s very exciting for us.
Tim Freeman
Printing Industries Alliance
Getting the Word Out About Printing
I think there’s a lot of misperceptions about printing. You go into some of the schools and you see guidance counselors with a lot of false information about the industry, about the technology that’s involved.
So, our mission is to get the word out and help promote the printing industry.
We started the Print Drives American Foundation about two years ago. Really with the idea of promoting the ROI of print, the effectiveness of printing, the size, and try to dispel some of the myths of people have about printing in terms of environmental issues, technology being outdated, and things of that nature. And that’s really the focus of our of our Print Drives America campaign.
Jason Cline
Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia
A Different Kind of Consolidation
We’re seeing, in our area, a lot of consolidation. Not for the companies but the capabilities that they offer.
Somebody that only does one specific thing, if they’re very successful in their niche, they’re likely to be successful continuing on.
Like a like a special invitation or something like that. But if they only do one type of printing or one type of finishing, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be successful going forward.
We’re seeing a lot of consolidation in efforts and a lot of consolidation in capabilities. And what that leads to is a consolidation of businesses, which has an effect on the entire industry.
For associations, you know there’s an association for everything. And as companies consolidate, its capabilities consolidate and associations are likely to consolidate as well. I think we’ll continue to see that in the future.
We’ve noticed that just within our own, affiliate land, we we do a lot of projects together because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to recreate the wheel, if somebody else is already doing that then you can partner with them.
I think that speaks highly for companies, as well in the printing industry. They may not be wanting to expand their own capabilities, but they may want to work with somebody and share business and things like that.
Bruce Steinberg
RELYCO
Specialty Paper Continues to Grow
We focus on specialty papers, specifically our REVLAR waterproof and tear proof paper. It’s a synthetic paper made out of plastic. And it’s used for maps, manuals, menus, signage.
And it’s a great product run through laser printers. We have it for different coatings for inkjet lasers or offsets.
You can’t tear it. It’s waterproof. You can perf it. You can punch it. It’s great for your temporary license plates to running bids to manuals out in the field.
It’s used by the US military for all their field manuals out in the field. It can get shot at and you still can read it.
We’re seeing a huge amount of growth in this product line right now. And I think people want something that’s durable, ones that’s going to last and are willing to spend a little bit more money for something that they know they’ll have for 10 years.
I think 2020 will be strong, I think they’ll grow industry wide at maybe about 4 to 5%.
2021, I think we’ll probably flatten out a little bit. Print as whole is still, you know, overall, it’s not a high growth market. I think people are still transitioning some of their business to electronic. And if we do go into a market correction, I think print always takes a hit.
How did our experts do last year? Check out our 2019 Printing Industry Predictions.