Mark Nixon has joined AVT as global strategic account manager having left Scodix where he had spent ten years in the summer.
“It had got to the point where I was no longer making a lot of difference,” he says. “I wanted to try something different.” The departure was on good terms, he stresses. There was no plan beyond spending two or three months travelling around the world doing different things. Then came renewed contact with AVT CEO Roy Porat. “I had decided I needed a job and Roy asked if I was interested. I started at the beginning of December.”
Venture capital company Porat Italy had bought AVT from Danaher where it had been a sister company to Esko, earlier this year, returning the business to independent ownership. Porat and Nixon had forged a strong relationship during the period when Porat had been CEO of Scodix during its adolescent phase.
There are similarities between Scodix at that point and AVT now, a focus on R&D and lack of pressure from shareholders.
AVT is focused on driving up quality in flexo printing through provision of colour and quality control systems. A single unit can assess quality, registration and spectrophotometric measurement of colour. This can be tracked remotely to demonstrate consistency to end customers.
AVT is now opening a showroom and demonstration facility in Brussels backed by recruitment of staff across its EMEA region to ensure that engineering support is available within 48 hours.
The job will be a first step into flexo for Nixon. He began his career in sales with litho plate supplier Howson Algraphy moving into prepress technology with Scitex, then Creo and KBA UK before joining Scodix. At Scodix he established the business in the US, setting up a structure that is now established.
The new role will require engagement with the largest packaging groups in the world, Amcor, Smurfit Westrock and so on to understand the pressure points on the their business and to feed this back to the development team in Israel.
First comes an intense period of training to understand AVT’s products before he begins hitting departure lounges in the new year.
