While the digital industrial print market in Europe is a bit more mature than North America, the U.S. is developing into an important market for print innovation, according to a new white paper produced by I.T. Strategies for InPrint USA: The Industrial Print Show., which is co-locating with ICE EXPO from April 25-27 in Orlando, Florida.
The North American market for industrial digital or production represents about 30 percent of the global market, while Europe represents a slightly larger share at around 34 percent. 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 is 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,” says 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 white paper 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 the office and consumer sectors.
Some of the highlights of the white paper 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 of something just north 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 percent of their revenues fall into this classification, which is driving these companies to seek new and scalable markets with great urgency.
- 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 for digital industrial printing is in the packaging sector with custom content, to serve increasingly fragmented demand patterns.
- Growth expectations for industrial analog print are estimated to follow a 2 percent annual inflationary growth rate. For digital inkjet, expected growth is considerably higher, 9 percent annually on average across all application segments, meaning that industrial print in the U.S. will grow in excess of $32 billion by 2020.
InPrint USA
