Business Management - Industry Trends

The recent bullish rise in industry shipments has changed the outlook in our different forecasting models for 2007 and 2008. Forecasting is sometimes viewed as guesswork or a black art, but there are numerous tools that forecasters use, and we use as many as we can find. Through the years, we have found that the use of statistical models helps to focus the discussion and immersion in anecdotal accounts are used to enrich prognostications. Every day, we review forecasts, and sometimes we joke there are often more forecasts than there are real data. There is one aspect of forecasts that continually befuddles us: the “consensus

Cadmus was bought by Cenveo. Cenveo chased Banta, and then R.R. Donnelley outbid them. Donnelley then bought Von Hoffman. Cenveo is a product of mergers. Donnelley is becoming one as well. There’s more to come. The fact that mergers and acquisitions exist in the printing business should not be a surprise: they have been going on for decades. The 1980s had their “greying of the industry” wave, as owners sold because their grown children had careers of their own, many deciding that printing was not for them. The 1990s had a growing stock market and Wall Street analysts who saw commercial printing as a

Printing Shipments Rise for Seventh Consecutive Month The printing industry had an excellent November, with shipments increasing +$504 million compared to 2005, a 6.2% rise. Comparative shipments are up for seven months in a row in current dollars, and for four consecutive months in inflation-adjusted dollars. The rise on an inflation-adjusted basis was +$355 million, or 4.6%. Printing Profits Up Four Quarters in a Row: Time To Cheer? Annualized, inflation-adjusted printing industry profits before taxes increased yet again. The industry produced $4.59 billion in profits over the last four quarters. This is the best industry profits performance in three years, though we are still running at the

THERE WAS a time not long ago (2005) when scarcely a week would go by without there being news of some new development in the growing “electronic paper” market. Perhaps “market” is the wrong word to use, as almost all the news that came out comprised solely of technology demonstrations, announcements of strategic partnerships, and prototype media and devices—none of which were available commercially. As a result, there was no real “market” to speak of. Still, the news was always exciting and sent the gadgets and gizmos crowd swooning with anticipation. And then, silence. What happened? It’s possible to interpret all

DON’T BELIEVE the pundits. The U.S. economy will expand, not contract, in 2007-2008, and to an annual growth rate of nearly 4 percent in GDP. This will reverse the downward adjusted 3.2 percent in 2006 and 2005. Our industry should makeready to run forward at near the GDP rate. The reason: print growth is tied to the “knowledge economy,” which is not calculated into GDP while government, an outlay, is. Research and development, if treated as a capital investment rather than as an intermediate expense, boosts GDP by 3 percent and the national savings rate by more than 2 percent. The U.S. accounts

PHOENIX—12/14/06—Here come the products. The annual IDTechEx event, Printed Electronics USA, took place in Phoenix, Arizona in December 2006 and it was larger than ever before, with over 300 delegates attending. IDTechEx prioritises the commercialisation of this technology in this conference series, which takes place annually in the US, UK and Japan. The term Printed Electronics rather than the old technically-led term Organic Electronics was apposite because, these days, the best devices increasingly involve both organic and inorganic patterning in the same device. But what really matters is do they work and can they benefit society? This year’s event was very different from

Among the more interesting issues in the printing industry is the constant, decades-old complaints about market pricing of print and its supposed roots in industry overcapacity. While those that topic will not be discussed here, it is essential to remember that the print medium exists in a larger communications marketplace, and now competes with more alternatives than ever for the same amount of budget dollars, and sometimes less. Recent reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show how prices have changed in these areas. The Consumer Price Index of inflation for the past two years has increased by 7.7% in total. Commercial printing prices have

NEW YORK CITY—Decenber 14, 2006—Despite rising postal rates, higher raw materials costs and the advent of numerous alternative channels, marketers continue to seek out the return on investment benefits of direct mail—spending $60.6 billion on the channel in 2006—according to a white paper released today by Winterberry Group, a leading strategic consulting firm serving the marketing industry. The white paper, entitled Vertical Market Trends in Direct Mail and the Impact on Production Service Providers 2006, is the New York-based consulting firm’s third annual study of the direct mail production sector. Based upon feedback provided through hundreds of interviews with executives from throughout the direct mail

NEW YORK CITY—December 13, 2006—The market for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) labels — particularly UHF labels — has not yet grown as stakeholders in the industry had hoped. According to a new study from ABI Research, the reason these core components of RFID tags have failed to achieve their expected potential is the relationship between prices, volumes, and the business case for RFID. In a classic “vicious circle” dynamic, production costs for UHF labels (hence for Gen 2 passive labels) are still at levels tending to inhibit the high-volume deployments that would provide economies of scale. Research analyst Robert Foppiani says, “At current

As we enter 2007, many RFID suppliers are licking their wounds, while for others, RFID business is booming. As IDTechEx interview solution providers and users across the RFID industry for the new report “RFID Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2007-2017” to be released in January, Raghu Das, CEO, summarizes some of the findings. The volumes that never came At the beginning of 2006, there was much optimism in the retail mandate sector. RFID tag production capacities had been put in place and Gen 2 was delivering superior performance than previous versions. However, arguably the pallet/case market for RFID tags became the nearest thing to