COMMERCIAL PRINTING -- Running Lean and Mean

The PIA economist also agrees that some printers will benefit more than others from the economic turnaround. He says the association's latest ratios study provides dramatic evidence of the continuing gulf between profit leaders and profit challengers in the printing industry.

"Profit leaders (those firms in the top 25 percentile of profitability) typically earn 10 to 20 times as much profit per dollar of sales as profit challengers (the other 75 percent of printers)," Davis points out.