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Any of you who have attended a conference where digital packaging printing was on the agenda inevitably heard someone state from the podium: “It’s now not a question of if we get into digital printing, but a question of when.” Many take those forward-leaning statements as an indication that digital’s time had come and the floodgates were just about open. Well, the gates have opened, but why is the flow still coming at a little more than a trickle?
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Let’s look at this issue from a historical perspective. The labels market was first introduced to digital printing solutions in the late 1990s and saw significant investment by OEMs and related suppliers. It has taken over 20 years, but recent sales of digital production presses now match those of analogue presses. Those who have invested in digital to supplement their analogue are installing one digital press for every three analogue presses. This is being done to relieve job pressure on the analogue presses, allowing them to be more effective and profitable. With experience, the industry realized that digital printing was not a printing solution. Still, another manufacturing process—this is when digital emerged as a productivity tool and became mainstream in the labels sector.
So now let’s look at digital in the corrugated packaging space, where there has again been significant OEM investment over the past decade. This is where digital has grown the most in packaging outside of labels. This discussion will focus on single-pass presses producing cartons and displays on corrugated paperboard substrates.
With a little over 100 such presses installed globally (about 20% of them roll-to-roll and the rest sheet-fed), adoption is still in the early days and accounting for a fraction of a per cent of the overall production. However, no one is talking about digital as a short-run tool in the roll-to-roll sector, where it is finding its footing. They are looking at it as one that allows the plant to run jobs more effectively and efficiently. Likewise, where sheet-fed systems are employed for carton production, users are beginning to use their digital assets to relieve pressure on other assets—freeing them up for more profitable work, even if it did not fit the short-run, high color model.
Allowing the plant to be more flexible in asset utilization has yielded an uptick in plant profitability. By looking at the digital press as a manufacturing tool rather than another printing process, users are more flexible in their asset utilization and can get more work shipped. While this isn’t the main view of the industry, it is gaining visibility as a growing amount of actionable research is becoming available.
On the education front, Keypoint Intelligence is developing and deploying a series of research tools designed to give all those in the packaging supply chain visibility of how, where, and by whom digital printing is being deployed and how it is being received by the brand and converting communities. These tools will be the ones many will use to develop their strategies (offensive and defensive) related to digital printing in their market areas.
Stay tuned to Keypoint Intelligence’s Labels & Packaging Division for more details as this program rolls out in early 2023.
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