Executive Q&A: John Mills, CEO of Xaar

John Mills became CEO of printhead manufacturer Xaar in 2019 after five years as CEO of Inca Digital. After a year or so of under-the-radar R&D and business planning, Xaar is now in the process of reinventing and rebranding itself, as well as launching the new ImagineX platform, which the company hopes will power Xaar products for the next 30 years. I spoke to John Mills about the new strategy, the new platform and the “new Xaar.”

WhatTheyThink: We had last met at FESPA Berlin in 2018 when you were still at Inca Digital. What subsequently attracted you to Xaar?

John Mills: Xaar is actually about four miles from Inca [in Cambridge, UK] and during my time at Inca Digital, we never bought a Xaar printhead. We were very aware of the fundamental benefits of Xaar printheads, but there were things in the technology which stopped us from using them. So when I came in [to Xaar], the opportunity was, what if we could actually fix the reasons why I wouldn’t have bought a Xaar printhead but retain all of the stuff that would make me buy a Xaar printhead? It’s really been the opportunity to do that.

WTT: What were some of those reasons for and against using a Xaar head? 

JM: OEMs want to do a range of fluids, and Xaar couldn’t do aqueous ink. Wide-format graphics now is largely UV. Users need to be able to give the nozzle plate a good clean, and to do that you need to have a robust nozzle plate, which Xaar printheads didn’t have. Also, in terms of the speed of the printheads, we needed to make them faster and we needed to print at higher resolutions. The great thing is that we can actually fix all of those things, and I’m pretty excited that we’re going to be able to deliver a printhead that also retains all of the things that make Xaar technology uniquely beneficial. 

WTT: The last five years have been a bit of a challenge for Xaar. What led to the need for a new strategy? 

JM: I think a lot of it concerned some of the decisions around the business model, but also the focus that Xaar had on thin film. Xaar is a good-sized company, but to develop a MEMS head requires a significant financial undertaking. If you’re going to do it, you need to focus and make sure you throw everything at it. And that’s what Xaar did. It managed to develop the 5601 on a budget of around £70 million or $100 million. Xaar did incredibly well to get a great product for such a relatively small amount of money, but the harsh reality was that it was hard to sustain that level of investment—about £20 million a year—for a market which really just hasn't materialized in a way that sustains that level of investment. Thin film is predominantly a kind of a water-based packaging type of printhead, and that market just hasn’t arrived in any real meaningful volume. So we were forced to shut it down—we tried to sell it but couldn’t, not because the technology didn’t work—it absolutely did—but everyone who looked at it concluded that the market wasn’t there. 

Now, the consequence of that single-minded focus on thin film was that everything else got pushed to the side. The core bulk development was ignored and the markets in which the bulk products would go into were largely ignored. When we shut thin film down, it was almost like we took out the reason Xaar had existed for the last five years. Everyone looked around and said, well, what’s left? There was also a huge amount of confusion in the market about what Xaar’s technology was, because we also sold other people’s printheads as ours. I talked to many OEMs I had known before I joined Xaar and the feedback was very clear about how they felt about Xaar, and it was relatively negative. So we needed to do a few things, but first of all, we needed to be very clear about our business, who we are, and what we’re going to do.

WTT: So you laid low for a year or so and retooled everything.

JM: We kind of kept our powder dry for a year, fixed the business model, and we’ve got a clear product roadmap. We’re focused on selling our own printheads. We needed to have a very clear visualization of what our technology is and where it’s going, hence the ImagineX platform. The OEMs that we’d lost because they got confused about who we were have come back to us now, and we’ve regained share in some of our key markets, like ceramics. We’re now in a much stronger position. That’s why the time is right to do the rebrand, because we’ve actually got some good stuff to talk about.

WTT: What is some of that good stuff? 

JM: As I mentioned, Xaar printheads typically have not been able to print aqueous fluids, and we now have a way to make our heads aqueous-compatible. We’re starting to work with customers in alpha and beta testing. The product is about 18 months away, but I think it’s a significant step forward. The other thing is around the speed of the heads, because of the shared-wall technology that Xaar adopts. 

WTT: Briefly explain “shared-wall” technology.

JM: If you were to ask, what’s one of the problems with Xaar heads—people would say they’re very slow because they only print one in three nozzles at a time. Each channel has a wall on either side. When the walls move to eject a drop from the nozzle, they move in such a way that the wall they share with the neighboring channel cannot also move in the same way. So whilst you’re ejecting a drop in one channel, you cannot eject a drop from the channel on either side.  So you’ve got what we call “three-phase printing.” You’re printing every third nozzle, and that has been one of the limitations of the Xaar technology. 

However, the benefit of Xaar’s technology is that the ink is continually flowing directly past the back of the nozzles; bubbles don't get trapped to block the printhead. They just continue to flow through, and debris and particles do the exact same thing. The reason we do really well in ceramics is because you have heavily pigmented inks, and those are difficult to keep in suspension. That’s what the “through-flow” [TF] technology is all about. The printheads are very reliable when it comes to heavily pigmented, highly viscous inks because you get a huge amount of power from those walls moving in and out to fire drops out. However, we have now found a way to print every single drop at the same time, which gives us a three-times improvement in speed. 

I said that I would never have bought a Xaar printhead while I was at Inca Digital because it didn’t have a robust nozzle plate, it was too slow, and it didn’t do aqueous inks. Well, now we’ve got a way to use water-based inks, we’ve got a way to actually get higher speeds, which exceed the competition, and we’re going to have a robust nozzle plate. Plus, we get all the benefits of Xaar printheads in terms of the re-circulation technology and the ability to print pigmented inks. If we pull all of this off, we’ll have the best printhead on the market. If you look at the range of inks that we can print, it’s far in excess of what somebody else can print. If you’ve got a difficult ink, if it’s quite viscous, if it’s pigmented, or if it has some functionality that requires additives, which makes it more difficult to print, then Xaar technology is absolutely the way to go. We’ve won over 30 accounts in the last nine months with companies where there is a requirement to print more challenging inks. 

WTT: To circle back to the start, is Inca Digital going to be a customer of yours at some point?

JM: I do hope so. If I look at the product that I described to you, if I could take that product and put it into an onset, I think it would be an incredible product. So a lot of what we’re doing now is thinking about what are the products that I would have wanted at Inca Digital, and if we can deliver those, then we know we’re on the right track.