Wide-Format Printing: Still a Compelling Business Opportunity and Investment Category

We are putting the final touches on our Printing Outlook 2019, based in large part on the results of our Winter 2018–2019 Business Outlook survey (as well as the usual fever dream of government charts). The report should be hitting our eStore in the next week or two, and as always, there is quite a lot in the report, but in this article I want to highlight a few items specific to wide-format and specialty printing.

• In our Winter 2018–2019 survey of print businesses, 12% of respondents  see “adding wide-format printing capabilities” as a business opportunity in 2019—this is up from 10% in our previous year’s survey. 
• This opportunity rises to 17% of 10–19-employee establishments and 15% of 1–9-employee establishments.
• In terms of planned investments, 9% of respondents (up from 3%) say they are looking at buying a flatbed UV wide-format printer.
• Meanwhile, 6% (down from 8%) say they plan to invest in a solvent or eco-solvent wide-format printer.
• And 5% (up from 1%) say they plan to invest in a latex wide-format printer. Given the heightened interest in flatbed printers in this year’s survey, it’s possible HP’s recent introduction of a Latex machine capable of printing on rigid materials was responsible, at least in part, for the increased attractiveness of latex. 

In the next 12 months, which of the following represent your best new business opportunities?

By the way, we did not find very high levels of planned investment in too many categories this survey; just about one-fifth of respondents said “we have no planned investments.” 

We also asked a question about respondents’ intent to add various specialty printing capabilities. We had asked about a variety of products and services, such as production inkjet, 3D printing, printed electronics, and different kinds of packaging, but the most relevant items for our purposes here are:

Do you plan to add any of the following capabilities in the next 12 months? 

At that 13% who selected “specialty printing” was the top response for this question. 

In the previous year’s survey, we had found that the wide-format investment fever had largely broken, and we were getting the sense that the commercial print transition and expansion to wide format was largely complete. (I have also found to be confirmed anecdotally.) In this survey, there is the sense that it is starting to pick up again, or that shops that started down the wide-format path are now moving into new areas. For example, someone bought a solvent printer to get their feet wet and is now adding a flatbed to expand their product offerings. And remember that UV printers—be they big flatbeds or smaller desktop units—can be used to print those “specialty printing” items. So as we remarked last year, we can interpret these planned investment figures—largely—as adding capacity and the pursuit of new applications rather than brand-new installations. 

As has been the case for the past couple of years, specialty printing is becoming more and more the mainstream, especially as it become easier and easier to print on three-dimensional objects—or, indeed, any surface—and often using the same equipment and ink (with caveats) used for printing on more traditional substrates. Specialty printing is also growing substantially in inplant printing departments.

The survey findings in general reflect a printing industry that seems to have had a change in mindset compared to surveys we have been conducting for the past 20 years, with some of the more traditional cares and concerns of less interest than newer, more compelling issues. It’s actually encouraging to see that print business owners are thinking more strategically than had been the case in the past (in the report we caution, as always, about “survivor bias” affecting the results). Combined with what seems to be a resurgence (to some extent) in printing shipments this year, perhaps we have turned a corner.

Today’s textile feature by Cary Sherburne offers examples of the analog-to-digital transformation in the textiles and apparel industry, driven by entrepreneurs disrupting the status quo. These are instructive examples as the commercial printing industry in general has long needed some status quo disruption—and perhaps that disruption is finally starting to take place.