Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 27 March 2008
Readers have their say on last week's news. Andy McCourt stirs the possums, as usual, Fuji Xerox hits the sweet spot and bad debts are a plague upon the industry.
Re: Web printing shifts - did anyone notice? Andy McCourt's commentary
Excellent article and this backs up my decision that after 20 years in the newspaper game and after passing my MBA last June I decided to dedicate the next 20 years of my working life to other manufacturing as I felt newspaper offset printing was a dying process/product in a dying market.
Still enjoy your publication though.
Paul Mason
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The article states: "The fragmentation of the web offset market will be driven by the availability of smaller, faster and more versatile digital inkjet presses. If I were any newspaper or PMP, IPMG, Bluestar, AIW, Cadlillac, Rotary Offset or Quality Group; I would be forming a task group right now to plan for the gradual shift."
The question is .... What sort of representation would be invited to participated in such a task force if such a task force were to form?
... It sounds like that the forward scouts of the commercial print sector are beginning to realize the implications of a trend that has been going on a long time (in digital economy time) is beginning to bite. And that there is a gradual realization that we are seeing the emergence of the ascendancy of knowledge processes over business processes? Again the question ... who would be a member of your task force ... and why?
What is this gradual shift that is being referred to ... from what to what? Do your readers have any idea what is meant by an ink droplet 'event horizon"? If they did have some understanding of such meaning, what might be the objective of your suggested taskforce?
Richard Vines
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Like so many others [we] are finding things tough out there and finding that our customers in turn are finding it tough and not paying. Currently I have found that one of our customers has become a bad debt and after a little digging around, I have found out they are also a bad debt at other companies.
Without mentioning names (at this stage) two other printing companies have also carried this debtor to 90 days plus. We did all the checks you do on new customers, even our factoring company did these check and all smelled like roses. But by the time it reached the 90 day bracket things started to smell a little fishy and the promises started to flow which where regular broken, and of course now he wont return emails or phones calls.
So why is this different? We have since found that the other two companies have had debts into 120/150/180 day brackets. Why did they not start legal action sooner? As at this time they still have not started these proceeding. If they had done so, the credit checks would not of been so clean!
So now for the fun bit, we have found that the customer’s customer has paid the account from the printer broker and thus he has not passed on the funds at all to any supplier. What I am actually asking is there (of course with actual proof) any way we can display names of suck blood suckers and remove them out of our industry and stop people like these using printers in such a way – working for 90 days and running to the next supplier. The figures I am discussing are as follows; me approx $100k, part two $40k, part three $100k, so this is definitely deliberate.
Any other information you think I should follow up would be appreciated, but this email is simply to protect others from such a fate as mine.
Regards
Jeremy Woolf
Director
Rite-A-Type
Artarmon NSW
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Re: Fuji Xerox keeps the ball rolling
Interesting design makes me want to take up tennis - can't understand why!
Regards
Arthur
Print2Day