2008 Hot Markets — Charting Your Course

The biggest growers are fresh-packaged foods and pet foods ($4.5B to print, +19 percent), while the slowest is bottled, canned and confections/baked goods ($3.1B to print, +2 percent). Sheetfed litho label plants will starve.

Get With the Program

At Number 5 is computer software ($434B, +23 percent; with $11.1B to print, +13 percent). Networking and mainframe computing ($3.0B to print, +35 percent) companies are designing complex support software and maintenance for the rapidly increasing numbers and varieties of mobile devices and connectivity methods beyond cellular. Online help, graphics cards for games, streaming video, mobile banking, sales transactions, etc., are driving these categories.