Ten digital presses at one site – why, who and what? News commentary by Andy McCourt

A total of ten Nexpress 2100+ presses, with an order value of around $8 million, will be installed at the Hampshire, UK headquarters of FSP Ltd – a company formed in 2005 to address the HIP (Home Information Pack) market where all house sellers will be obliged to provide a comprehensive report on the condition and title status of their property. FSP stands for First Seller’s Pack.

FSP started with two trial Nexpress 2100 presses in early 2006 and placed the order for another eight at Ipex in April. Managing director Martin Trusccott has no intention of addressing the wider commercial print market: “FSP was not formed to, and has no intention of, handling conventional print, or even the digital equivalent of it. The Nexpress presses have been acquired for the explicit purpose of the production of the information packs that all house owners will be required to have if they want to sell their property from June 1st 2007.”

HIPs effectively transfer a substantial part of the onus of home surveying from the buyer to the seller. It is estimated the end cost for an HIP will be between $900 and $1500 – indicating that print costs are a minor part of the end product. Think of an HIP as a car ‘Roadworthy certificate’ but for a home. As with cars, you won’t be able to sell a home in the UK without one from next year and many sellers are already using them. The aim is to eliminate gazumping (where a third party out-bids a buyer who has already made an offer and incurred costs), by accelerating the offer-to-sale contract stage.

The print market for HIPs is huge and FSP aim to garner 60per cent of it with their ten Nexpresses. FSP has also invested in design, language translation, bindery and delivery systems. The company is praiseworthy of Kodak’s responsiveness to their specialist digital printing needs:

“Kodak has created some very clear solutions with Nexpress. The print quality is equal to that produced on a traditional litho press while its speed, versatility and reliability give us the ability to deliver the finished HIP product. Kodak has listened to, understood and meet our needs right from the print fulfillment requirements and financial packaging through to the finishing options,” concludes Truscott.

The news of the world’s largest Kodak Nexpress order came two days after the release of a Pira (Printing Industry Research Association), study by Frank Romano that shows digital printing – currently around 10per cent of all printing – will reach 30per cent by 2015 for a total global market of around $208 billion. (Extrapolating this to Australia/New Zealand at a typical 2per cent of world market and we have a AUD$4.16 billion digital print sector in 8 years time.) It also shows that the number of offset, flexo and gravure printing presses operating worldwide will almost halve from an estimated 1.15 million presses in 2005 to 674,000 by 2015. This far-reaching study is available from Pira at AUD$8,750 (GBP£3,500) Email: stephen.hill@pira-international.com

My call:
It’s yet another example of digital’s unstoppable march into niche, versioned and variable printing. FSP’s investment can be considered an ‘inplant’ in many senses of the definition. They are not printers, they are servicing a specific business sector and they bring in specialist knowledge and skills that result in the value of the printed product far exceeding the material costs of ink and paper.

How many other sectors can benefit from this lateral-thinking approach? Direct marketing is of course one but there must be many others that can create print markets that weren’t there before, or are currently serviced electronically. At Ipex, another UK digital printer, Ravensworth, announced it was ordering more Xeikon presses to service its real-estate customers. Ravensworth’s average print runs are 20-155 A4 copies with anything up to 2,500 ‘make-readies’ per day. In one week, Ravensworth produced over 2 million impressions – and sheet 1 was sold for the same price as sheet 2 million. Think about that.

It’s also confirmation of the tenet that digital printing is not a direct substitute for offset – it creates opportunities of its own. It does of course impact on offset but not because a job once printed offset shifts to digital – it’s because customer demands are moving from mass production of the same items to smaller runs of variable, dynamic and targeted print.

Here’s a scary statistic – the Pira report predicts that 50per cent of all labels will be digitally printed by 2015. Half the market! Also, DM digital print will grow from $3.1 billion in 2005 to $14.3 billion by 2015.

2015 is just two Drupas and two Ipex’s away – there is time for all farmer-printers to plant their fields with fertile digital seeds and get their share of this once-in-a-lifetime growth opportunity. What’s more, short-run variable print delivered JITNOT (just in the nick of time), is hard, if not impossible, to offshore.

Look out for the definitive digital trends report in August Print 21 magazine.