While the digital industrial print market in Europe is slightly more mature than North America, the U.S. is developing into an important market for print innovation, according to a new whitepaper produced by I.T. Strategies for InPrint USA: The Industrial Print Show. The North American market for industrial digital or production represents about 30% of the global market, while Europe represents a slightly larger share at around 34%. However, there are key differences between the regions – differences that give America an advantage in growth development towards higher volumes of industrial digital production markets.
“There’s tremendous opportunity for growth for digital industrial print technology in the U.S. due to the large number of manufacturing companies. While the U.S. market adopts technology differently than Europe, a unified U.S. market attracts larger participants and demand groups,” said Marcus Timson, co-founder of InPrint. “Combine that with the unique infrastructure for financing and developing new ventures that U.S. companies have access to, and you have strong prospects for business and revenue growth.”
InPrint USA defines industrial print as “using print technologies within the process of manufacturing.” It refers to a procedure whereby ink or another substance is printed onto a product for either functional or decorative purposes. This new whitepaper gives a snapshot of industrial print markets in North America, with the objective to define the size of projects and provide examples of the development of markets for digital print technology, – beyond both the office and consumer sectors.
Some of the highlights of the whitepaper include:
- The digital industrial print industry is supplied by less than 100 vendors globally, many of which are in Japan, with total revenues for systems, technology and imaging chemistry in excess of $110 billion.
- These global vendors are all heavily invested in office and consumer markets which, while still very profitable, are mature and in decline. In fact, more than 85% of their revenues fall into this classification, which is driving these companies to urgently seek new and scalable markets.
- The most important value propositions for adopting digital industrial print are cost reduction, faster response, and creation of new market opportunities. However, the biggest long-term value proposition is in the packaging sector with custom content that serves increasingly fragmented demand patterns.
- Growth expectations for industrial analogue print are estimated to follow a 2% annual inflationary growth rate. For digital inkjet, expected growth is considerably higher (9% annually on average across all application segments), meaning that industrial print in the U.S. will grow in excess of $32 billion by 2020.
