12th Annual Inkjet Summit: Navigating the Inkjet Market with Optimism

On Monday, the 12^th annual Inkjet Summit kicked off at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida. The opening keynote sessions were delivered to a standing-room-only audience, with everyone excited to hear more about the latest advances in inkjet technologies — and how those advances can help them grow their business.

Sponsored by Canon Solutions America, HP, Ricoh, and SCREEN, the opening keynotes were full of optimism. Conference Chair Marco Boer, vice president of I.T. Strategies, Inkjet Summit, started things off by noting that while this past year has been “the most complex and complicated year we’ve seen in inkjet with so many variables being thrown at us,” he is incredibly excited both about where inkjet is today, and where it is going next.

To set the stage, he noted some of the top challenges commercial printers are facing today — all things inkjet can help alleviate. First, he noted, there is a lack of qualified labor to run offset presses, a problem that isn’t going away any time soon. That said, he noted, an operator who knows nothing about print can be up and running an inkjet press in nearly no time at all, making it an ideal technology for any print operation struggling to find the people to get the jobs out the door.

Second, he noted, paper costs are rising — and that isn’t going to stop. While things have stabilized for now, Boer noted that during the pandemic those prices had doubled — and he expects them to double again in the next five to 10 years. With that in mind, print is going to move from a commodity product to a luxury. Which means, he said, “all that low relevancy print will disappear, and high value print will dominate. What we are left with are the things that have immense value that people can’t do without.”

Those things include jobs that have a high degree of personalization, for example, or that push the boundaries of what we think of as traditional commercial print. “The print industry’s business model is broken,” said Boer. “For decades we focused on volume and scale, but that is now working against us — particularly on the offset side.”

Marco Boer, conference chair and vice president of I.T. Strategies, described the landscape of the inkjet space during his keynote session.

Finally, he noted, rising postage costs will continue to impact the industry in profound ways, further pushing print into the luxury category. He also noted that the increasing push for sustainable communication will be even more important going forward. Right now that is a bigger movement in Europe than the United States, but anyone who works with global brands will need to be more aware of the issue and more strategic in the use of high-value print going forward.

And all of these issues are things inkjet excels at, allowing commercial printers to produce highly personalized, highly valuable communications that consumers want to pick up and keep. Brands might be moving away from applications such as mass mailing postcards, for example, but they will still be looking for partners to help them produce smaller, targeted mailings that connect with specific customers and create an emotional connection.

“Savvy commercial printers are driving the value higher with digital printing, and there is evidence this is working to increase their revenues,” Boer said. While overall the industry has seen a loss of about 19% of revenues since before the pandemic, he noted, almost all of that has been on the offset side of the equation. And while digital still makes up only a small portion of the pages printed today — under 10% of pages are printed inkjet right now — he pointed out that the percentage is growing, and he expects as much as 30% of printed pages to be produced digitally by 2028.

“2024 is going to be a tipping point from conventional offset to inkjet,” said Boer. “It’s not there yet, but as offset print gets more expensive, and the economies of scale decline, paper will become a luxury product. People are only going to print the pages they absolutely want, and those pages will ultimately end up on the digital side.”

He continued, “so yes, it’s complicated, and there are so many variables challenging us. But it is a really good time to be in this business if you’re brave enough to change your business model and focus more on high value and high revenue jobs rather than volume. If you can do that, you’ll be in a better position than you’ve ever been in before. It won’t be easy, but there is a tremendous amount of hope.”

Other Great Sessions

Beyond Boer’s excellent keynote setting the atmosphere for the rest of the conference to come, there were two other sessions opening the first day.

Barb Pellow, manager of Pellow & Partners, moderated a panel session with four printers who have made the switch to inkjet with great success, seeing their revenues rise beyond what they thought possible, although not without some growing pains. Don Kirkland, president of ArborOakland in Royal Oak, Michigan; Johnathan Wallace, president of Wallace Graphics in Duluth, Georgia; Tonya Spiers, president and owner of Knight Abbey in Biloxi, Mississippi; and Jason Fonner, vice president of Forge, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, all joined Pellow to talk about their inkjet journey and what they have learned along the way.

Barb Pellow (left), manager of Pellow & Partners, moderated a panel about inkjet efficiency and profitability. She was joined by (from left) Don Kirkland, president of ArborOakland; Johnathan Wallace, president of Wallace Graphics; Tonya Spiers, president and owner of Knight Abbey; and Jason Fonner, vice president of Forge.

A few highlights from the panel included that production inkjet is delivering real results for business owners, improving the speed, quality, time to market, and profitability of these printers, not to mention opening up new business opportunities. However, businesses investing in inkjet need to keep a few things in mind, such as the finishing that will go alongside the inkjet equipment, the software infrastructure, and the overall workflow needs to be adjusted to accommodate a very different type of print mentality.

In the final session of day one, Pat McGrew, managing director of McGrewGroup, took to the stage to give an overview of artificial intelligence and it’s impact — both right now and in the future — on the printing industry. While sessions later in the Inkjet Summit will go into more detail, McGrew gave attendees a good look at what all the various terms we hear thrown around mean, and how they can be applied to commercial print in general, and inkjet production in particular.

A few takeaways from her sessions included the realization that every major inkjet vendor incorporated some type of machine learning into their offerings some time ago. Those technologies are getting more sophisticated, but whether you know it or not, AI is already in your print shop. Second, that some of the emerging, advanced tools are going to be a boon for some elements of print production, such as workflow and data analysis. Finally, she urged attendees to keep an eye out for AI tools across all of their software and hardware platforms, and find innovative ways to use them.

Stay tuned for coverage from the rest of Inkjet Summit 2024 — and if you would like to attend next year, be sure to check out ijsummit.com.