Before heading to Drupa (and through the new entrance) printers should do their own brainstorm assessment of where they are.
The world of print will gather in Dusseldorf in just a few weeks’ time, eight years after the last pilgrimage to honour innovation in print. For many visitors and exhibitors Drupa 2024 will be like a Brigadoon, a magical land where the intervening eight years has not happened. The industry will pick up where it left off. And that is a major problem.
As always, printers will flock to Drupa expecting to see the latest print technology, prepared to be wowed by the razzamatazz, the technology, the samples and the possibilities. This is such stuff as dreams are made on. And they will not be disappointed. From Heidelberg to Landa, from HP to Canon, the newest, most advanced and most exciting print technology on the planet will be put through its impressive paces (whether or not the technology is real). This is what happened at Drupa in 2016 and it is what will happen at Drupa 2024.
This is a huge problem. The world has changed radically since 2016. We have had Covid, disruption to extended supply chains, a war in Europe and an energy crisis. Consumer technology has continued to develop. Digital communication is even more important thanks to ever more sophisticated smart phones and the apps that fill them. Even professional photographers are taking pictures without a conventional camera now. Now generative AI is pulling into the station without us knowing where that particular train will take us.
And yet in the Drupa bubble we will be looking at highly sophisticated printing machines that in many cases are the consequence of market analysis and development projects extending back as far as 2016. In many cases these risk being solutions for a bygone age.
That this is the case is only now becoming apparent. We know that lockdown accelerated the take up of online shopping, changing habits that extend back 50 years or more. This is inflicting damage on the country’s high street, underlined by the demise of The Body Shop, which was once a beacon for young shoppers on a Saturday and is now in administration, partly because of the demands of private equity ownership, mostly because of the advent of rivals like Sephora and online shopping opportunities.
Work from home has burst onto the scene. What was largely restricted to a generation poring over a laptop in a coffee shop, is now an expectation for many. The conventional workplace is struggling to cope with demands to be present in the office at all times and the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-only movement. This might have happened without the catalyst of Covid, but it would have been slower and harder to establish. For some the commitment to work and employment itself is not what it was: why work hard for the marriage, mortgage and family if there is zero possibility of owning a home before life on earth becomes unbearable because of this type of human activity? There can be no surprise that GenZ has different attitudes to previous generations.
There are many more examples of how Covid is changing the world. Some have yet to become apparent. At Drupa in 2016 nobody was talking about ecommerce having a major effect on society and therefore on print. Online print ordering was about business cards, flyers and birthday cards. There are now no limits. In 2016 few were talking about the urgency of decarbonising because of the climate crisis. In 2016 we knew that the industry’s workforce was ageing, but we didn’t consider this an existential crisis. We should now. In 2016 we might have recognised that inkjet printing was the future even as we ordered a new litho press. In 2016 we could watch the Landa presentation while still pretending that the technology had a long way to go until it was ready for widespread adoption. It seems so long ago, but also yesterday.
In 2024 many visitors will sit and watch whatever demonstration Landa has; they will be impressed at the capabilities; they will discuss what they have seen over a Dusseldorf Alt beer later in the evening. But will conclude that their customers are not asking the questions to which Landa or any of the other technologies on display are the answer.
That is because the analysis is frequently wrong. Too many printers rely on information and presentations from technology providers to describe the world that they operate in. These technology providers are trying to sell the equipment that they have developed over the last five or six years, at a time when their plans and road maps were about a future they could imagine. Covid never entered their plans. Those road maps have been ripped up.
This does not mean that what is introduced at Drupa this year is already out of date. It may mean that what is seen is not enough. It may be that the most relevant technologies for the future will come from unexpected quarters because the major companies are not nimble enough to adapt to changing conditions.
Before heading to Drupa, printers should do their own brainstorm assessment of where they are and what their challenges are going to be in the next three to five years. What trajectory are their customers on, who are the new customers, how will the company meet these changes (if indeed there will be changes), what sort of technology will be needed, what about staff skills, what about the post Covid landscape? Armed with this work as preparation, what there is at Drupa may make greater sense. This applies too to printers that have no plans to visit Dusseldorf. What happens at Drupa will still have a impact.
The most important outcome of Drupa may therefore be a deeper appreciation of where the industry is headed over the next three to five years, what will drive the different market shifts, which sectors are growing and which are slowing.
There will be plenty of comment in this respect. Heidelberg for example is saying that its presence at the show will focus on four areas hanging over the industry: the challenge of finding labour, sustainability, automation and the energy crisis. Heidelberg is not alone. It is describing the universal pressures on print. Printers can in many cases add the challenge of what is perceived as low cost, targetable digital media. This message is coming from a handful of tech companies that have an air of invulnerability about them. In response are thousands of small printers where even the biggest cannot come close to Alphabet or Meta in terms of revenue or market dominance. They can simply make more noise and thanks to inventing the tech, it is believed they have a better grasp of the future.
There will be solutions. Perhaps the most marked change compared to Drupa 2016 will be the sheer number of robots to be seen. There will be robots to lift and load pallets and boxes, there will be robots to change printing plates and there will be robots to move pallets of work in progress from one process to another. In 2016 there was a spider robot picking up and stacking individual items after being laser cut. In 2012 a robot moved work from a KBA press to a guillotine. That was it. Now robots are considered the solution to the labour crisis – if you can’t employ someone to load cartons with books or folded leaflets, then invest in a robot.
Until the last couple of years, robots in print businesses were a curiosity. Today they may be essential. Likewise sustainability in 2016 was a distant voice and probably meant printing with vegetable oil inks, eliminating IPA from fount solutions and using process-free printing plates. Printers could offset emissions through forestry projects, investment in solar panels or stoves in Africa. Sustainability existed but interested the few. Today sustainability is essential for the many. Every exhibitor at Drupa will position itself inside a sustainability matrix. In many cases while explaining how their technology is more sustainable than ever before, developers will not admit that this sustainability message has only been grafted on to a lengthy development cycle in the last few months. Transparency is needed so that visitors can make valid comparisons between what they see on show. This is especially true with digital print technologies. Inkjet printing with water based inks needs matched drying capacity, requiring energy – but how much one machine needs and how much another seems to be a conversation that people are not having.
We know that extended supply chains are rapidly becoming too risky, less appealing in terms of cost as low cost labour becomes mid cost labour and at risk of disruption caused by disease or armed conflicts. The opportunity exists for localised production, but what changes are needed to create the persuasive offer to enact this change? That might require an amalgam of technologies from different providers who are otherwise fierce competitors. Is Drupa going to provide that?
The organisers will have areas showing the potential from packaging, sustainability, textile printing and printed electronics. These should not be ignored as irrelevant. Printers facing a decline in demand for commercial print owe it to themselves to understand how they might pivot their business. They owe it to themselves to do some preparation work and they owe to themselves to visit Drupa.
The time is right for Drupa dreams
Before heading to Drupa (and through the new entrance) printers should do their own brainstorm assessment of where they are.
The world of print will gather in Dusseldorf in just a few weeks’ time, eight years after the last pilgrimage to honour innovation in print. For many visitors and exhibitors Drupa 2024 will be like a Brigadoon, a magical land where the intervening eight years has not happened. The industry will pick up where it left off. And that is a major problem.
As always, printers will flock to Drupa expecting to see the latest print technology, prepared to be wowed by the razzamatazz, the technology, the samples and the possibilities. This is such stuff as dreams are made on. And they will not be disappointed. From Heidelberg to Landa, from HP to Canon, the newest, most advanced and most exciting print technology on the planet will be put through its impressive paces (whether or not the technology is real). This is what happened at Drupa in 2016 and it is what will happen at Drupa 2024.
This is a huge problem. The world has changed radically since 2016. We have had Covid, disruption to extended supply chains, a war in Europe and an energy crisis. Consumer technology has continued to develop. Digital communication is even more important thanks to ever more sophisticated smart phones and the apps that fill them. Even professional photographers are taking pictures without a conventional camera now. Now generative AI is pulling into the station without us knowing where that particular train will take us.
And yet in the Drupa bubble we will be looking at highly sophisticated printing machines that in many cases are the consequence of market analysis and development projects extending back as far as 2016. In many cases these risk being solutions for a bygone age.
That this is the case is only now becoming apparent. We know that lockdown accelerated the take up of online shopping, changing habits that extend back 50 years or more. This is inflicting damage on the country’s high street, underlined by the demise of The Body Shop, which was once a beacon for young shoppers on a Saturday and is now in administration, partly because of the demands of private equity ownership, mostly because of the advent of rivals like Sephora and online shopping opportunities.
Work from home has burst onto the scene. What was largely restricted to a generation poring over a laptop in a coffee shop, is now an expectation for many. The conventional workplace is struggling to cope with demands to be present in the office at all times and the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-only movement. This might have happened without the catalyst of Covid, but it would have been slower and harder to establish. For some the commitment to work and employment itself is not what it was: why work hard for the marriage, mortgage and family if there is zero possibility of owning a home before life on earth becomes unbearable because of this type of human activity? There can be no surprise that GenZ has different attitudes to previous generations.
There are many more examples of how Covid is changing the world. Some have yet to become apparent. At Drupa in 2016 nobody was talking about ecommerce having a major effect on society and therefore on print. Online print ordering was about business cards, flyers and birthday cards. There are now no limits. In 2016 few were talking about the urgency of decarbonising because of the climate crisis. In 2016 we knew that the industry’s workforce was ageing, but we didn’t consider this an existential crisis. We should now. In 2016 we might have recognised that inkjet printing was the future even as we ordered a new litho press. In 2016 we could watch the Landa presentation while still pretending that the technology had a long way to go until it was ready for widespread adoption. It seems so long ago, but also yesterday.
In 2024 many visitors will sit and watch whatever demonstration Landa has; they will be impressed at the capabilities; they will discuss what they have seen over a Dusseldorf Alt beer later in the evening. But will conclude that their customers are not asking the questions to which Landa or any of the other technologies on display are the answer.
That is because the analysis is frequently wrong. Too many printers rely on information and presentations from technology providers to describe the world that they operate in. These technology providers are trying to sell the equipment that they have developed over the last five or six years, at a time when their plans and road maps were about a future they could imagine. Covid never entered their plans. Those road maps have been ripped up.
This does not mean that what is introduced at Drupa this year is already out of date. It may mean that what is seen is not enough. It may be that the most relevant technologies for the future will come from unexpected quarters because the major companies are not nimble enough to adapt to changing conditions.
Before heading to Drupa, printers should do their own brainstorm assessment of where they are and what their challenges are going to be in the next three to five years. What trajectory are their customers on, who are the new customers, how will the company meet these changes (if indeed there will be changes), what sort of technology will be needed, what about staff skills, what about the post Covid landscape? Armed with this work as preparation, what there is at Drupa may make greater sense. This applies too to printers that have no plans to visit Dusseldorf. What happens at Drupa will still have a impact.
The most important outcome of Drupa may therefore be a deeper appreciation of where the industry is headed over the next three to five years, what will drive the different market shifts, which sectors are growing and which are slowing.
There will be plenty of comment in this respect. Heidelberg for example is saying that its presence at the show will focus on four areas hanging over the industry: the challenge of finding labour, sustainability, automation and the energy crisis. Heidelberg is not alone. It is describing the universal pressures on print. Printers can in many cases add the challenge of what is perceived as low cost, targetable digital media. This message is coming from a handful of tech companies that have an air of invulnerability about them. In response are thousands of small printers where even the biggest cannot come close to Alphabet or Meta in terms of revenue or market dominance. They can simply make more noise and thanks to inventing the tech, it is believed they have a better grasp of the future.
There will be solutions. Perhaps the most marked change compared to Drupa 2016 will be the sheer number of robots to be seen. There will be robots to lift and load pallets and boxes, there will be robots to change printing plates and there will be robots to move pallets of work in progress from one process to another. In 2016 there was a spider robot picking up and stacking individual items after being laser cut. In 2012 a robot moved work from a KBA press to a guillotine. That was it. Now robots are considered the solution to the labour crisis – if you can’t employ someone to load cartons with books or folded leaflets, then invest in a robot.
Until the last couple of years, robots in print businesses were a curiosity. Today they may be essential. Likewise sustainability in 2016 was a distant voice and probably meant printing with vegetable oil inks, eliminating IPA from fount solutions and using process-free printing plates. Printers could offset emissions through forestry projects, investment in solar panels or stoves in Africa. Sustainability existed but interested the few. Today sustainability is essential for the many. Every exhibitor at Drupa will position itself inside a sustainability matrix. In many cases while explaining how their technology is more sustainable than ever before, developers will not admit that this sustainability message has only been grafted on to a lengthy development cycle in the last few months. Transparency is needed so that visitors can make valid comparisons between what they see on show. This is especially true with digital print technologies. Inkjet printing with water based inks needs matched drying capacity, requiring energy – but how much one machine needs and how much another seems to be a conversation that people are not having.
We know that extended supply chains are rapidly becoming too risky, less appealing in terms of cost as low cost labour becomes mid cost labour and at risk of disruption caused by disease or armed conflicts. The opportunity exists for localised production, but what changes are needed to create the persuasive offer to enact this change? That might require an amalgam of technologies from different providers who are otherwise fierce competitors. Is Drupa going to provide that?
The organisers will have areas showing the potential from packaging, sustainability, textile printing and printed electronics. These should not be ignored as irrelevant. Printers facing a decline in demand for commercial print owe it to themselves to understand how they might pivot their business. They owe it to themselves to do some preparation work and they owe to themselves to visit Drupa.
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Prayers for the future of the print industry