Hard times drive printers towards digital

Sales of digital label printers are burgeoning despite the tumultuous global economic markets. According to Xeikon business development manager, Filip Weymans, the GFC has powered up the transition towards digital.

En-route to last week’s Labelexpo Asia event in Shanghai, Weymans touched down in Sydney on 24 November accompanied by Grish Rewal, director of of Xeikon’s Australian seller, absolute.

Weymans (pictured left) said that although 2011’s uncertain economic landscape may have been expected to pave the way for sluggish sales of digital label printing machines, the opposite was true, with Xeikon seeing an increase in sales of the machines.

“It shows you that in uncertain [economic] times there is still growth,” said Weymans, who believes that the flexibility of digital label machines has seen those in the industry favour the digital technology over traditional offset printing.

“What’s been driving the growth is the transition of the whole industry to providing more flexibility,” he said. “It’s now mostly conventional presses trying to compete with digital, whereas it used to be the other way around – [and] many more suppliers are coming on board. The technology has matured allowing for medium to longer runs at an affordable cost.”

Rewal (pictured right), whose company oversees Xeikon’s distribution in Australia, believes that the Global Financial Crisis has, in fact, hastened the printing industry’s transition into digital technology.

“After the GFC, organisations didn’t want to be sitting on masses of stock because the market became unpredictable,” said Rewal.

According to Rewal, with the shorter runs being made possible with digital machines, companies are able to employ smaller amounts of stock, depending on variable market requirements.