  |
By Kevin Keane, IAPHC CEO Sponsorships are Good Business From a member of the Graphics Arts Club of Jacksonville: "To say that being an IAPHC sponsor has its merits is an understatement. We use thousands of dollars of Finch Paper (three year International Gallery sponsor) and just the other day I purchased a GretagMacbeth (two year sponsor) densitometer. Sponsors scratch our back, and we scratch theirs. If I have a choice, guess which companies I will use." The IAPHC roster of world class sponsors is growing. We salute PrimeSource Corporation, Kohl & Madden, Fuji Photo Film USA, Neenah Paper, Finch Paper, Kodak Polychrome Graphics, the Print On Demand Initiative, GretagMacbeth, Blanks USA, Worzalla, Western States Envelope, Independent Machinery, Brandtjen & Kluge and our newest sponsor -- Collabria! Is it time your company was added to this list? It just might be good for business. Cogito ergo sum, Sony? or, Je Pense, donc je suis, Sony? "Sony's PlayStation2 is very likely to become the dominant platform for all long-distance education programs. Starting this year, Maricopa Community Colleges, the largest online university will require students to own a PlayStation2. So Sony will have the same impact on education as Microsoft had in the 20th century." Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author in the February Individual Investor magazine. Internet Insomnia? "Allstate Insurance Company announced that they would begin to sell their personal lines insurance products to customers via phone and the Internet. This may not seem particularly important at first glance, but in fact, it represents a major change in the way that insurance has traditionally been delivered to the public, that is, through insurance agents. This certainly will have an immediate effect on the future of more than 15,000 Allstate agents, who are understandably anxious about the decision." Minnesota Lawyers Mutual Insurance Company newsletter, February, 2000. Somehow, we suspect more than a few printers are anxious about the Internet too. Bob Rose, president of 58K.com says more than 60 per cent of all printers are now using the Internet in some way. "So much for the Internet replacing paper with electrons. Study after study has shown that e-mail, Web pages and such are generating more paper not less. Now it seems they are creating a greater need for the printing and delivery services they were supposed to make obsolete. ... No one suggests returning to the old practice of print-and-distribute --create a brochure or report, make scores of copies and ship them out. The Internet is switching that to distribute, then print --- create a document electronically, send it out in bits and bytes and let recipients make hard copies as needed. .... Internet start-ups including Nowdocs.com, Mimeo.com and Reprint.com accept documents in electronic form, print them and then deliver them to as many recipients as the customer will pay for " From an article in The New York Times earlier this month. We have covered firms like Nowdocs.com in previous issues of TMN. Mimeo.com was a new one however. Who are those guys? And why the Mimeo reference? The Times article continued: "Our biggest competition is our own potential customers," said Jeff Stewart, chief executive of Mimeo.com, which has been in business since 1998. "They are used to driving to Kinko's, or sitting in front of the printer or copy machine. We have to change behavior." Note the concept here. These new firms are mimicking the movement of retail sales to the Internet via e-commerce. The belief is that retail print customers will be happy to order from home or office. The British quick print chain All Kwik expects this trend will continue, and therefore has implemented a web based system to distribute printing jobs among its 200 shops scattered across Britain. Distribute, then print. Now in case our trusty reader assumes that Mimeo.com is only after the down and dirty copy work, consider the announcement on March 20 that Mimeo.com is using Xeikon DCP/32D color presses. Paul Peyrebrune, CEO at Xeikon America said: "For the first time ever, the superior performance of Xeikon digital printing is now available directly to a standard desktop user. The Xeikon technology enables Mimeo.com to deliver professional color quality anytime, anywhere its customers are located....to create viable e-commerce solutions." So where is Mimeo.com located? Memphis, Tennessee. Right next door to the North American hub for some little outfit called Federal Express. Get the picture? Another Times, the Los Angeles Times saw the portents last week also. Columnist Matthew Miller mused on the reports that 400,000 people downloaded Stephen King's new online novella the first day it was available. "When I was a management consultant a decade ago, one of our firm's sages had a newspaper client who was weighing whether to invest in a new printing plant. One day, my colleague told them, instead of building that plant, it'll be cheaper simply to give every subscriber a printer for free and then transmit a customized paper each morning for them to print at home. It seemed like one of those clever but crazy visions consultants sometimes use to make a point. Now, a blink in time later, as the King novella suggests, it's reality." Now, just before you reach for the hemlock, read these excerpts from Rick Thoman's keynote address at the recent On Demand Show. Mr. Thoman is the CEO of Xerox Corporation. "Our studies, backed up by data from XPLOR International, indicate that the total number of electronic and paper documents will soar to twenty trillion by 2005, and 40 percent of that market will be available to the digital printing industry." Thoman also said that by 2010, on demand digital printing will produce virtually all forms work, and most catalog and book products. "The impact of the digital, connected, Internet world can't be overstated. The Internet is bringing dynamic change to the new business of printing. Color will be pervasive. Documents themselves will change. They will move seamlessly between the paper and digital worlds and they will increasingly contain music and video as well as text and pictures." You can slumber, ala Rip Van Winkle, only at your peril! Can you handle one more piece of anecdotal evidence? "Adobe's products are in the sweet spot of some powerful market trends on the Internet, including digital photography and e-publishing, that are not one or two quarter events." Ben Reitzes, digital imaging analyst with Paine Webber. Funny thing is, until this writer installed Office 98, the previous edition of Word software didn't have the term Internet in its built-in dictionary! Morale Fiber in the Paper Biz No segment of our graphics world seems immune from the wave of consolidation. The paper industry has seen five takeovers, valued at some $20 billion, in just the last month. "A year ago, nobody was global and now you have major companies that are global," said Henson Moore, CEO of the American Forest and Paper Association. That trade group released some instructive numbers recently: US producer's annual capital investment is about $12,000 per employee, more than twice that of the textile industry. The largest papermaking machines are more than 550 feet long, weigh thousands of tons and can produce 1,000 miles of paper a day, in a 32 foot wide strip. One impact of this heavy capital equipment and investment cost has been a fragmented industry with more than 100 paper firms having sales of $1 billion or more. The big players hope to take costs out by acquiring other players, eliminating redundancies and hopefully gaining access to sources of lower cost production as well as new markets and customers. Will it work? On 25 February, Reuters quoted a Montreal based paper industry analyst quipping that he might soon lose his job because there would be no truly Canadian forest companies left to cover. While that gloomster is no doubt going to be proved wrong, things aren't easy in the low margin paper business; just last week, Crown Vantage, a firm based in Oakland, CA which came into being after a spin-off from James River Corp in 1995, said it had filed for Chapter 11 protection under the US Bankruptcy statute. The Hudson Bay Bazaar Over the past month, we have seen references to the mushrooming group of online marketplaces as being virtual trading posts or virtual bazaars. The graphic arts industry is getting is own marketplace activity. The paper industry has PaperExchange.com and printing industry has need of a Racing Form and a beefy RCMP to keep track of all the different online possibilities. One of the continuing bits of enjoyable obfuscation is to read the statistics bandied about. On February 29th, Forrester Research was quoted as predicting that the online paper and printing market will generate total sales of more than $200 billion over the next five years. On March 20th, Rich Begert, president of ImageX.com said: "In the $292 billion dollar U.S. printing and graphic arts industry, 8 out of 10 printing decisions are influenced or made by designers." On March 14th, Bloomberg commented on the PrintCafe online marketplace and said that the firm hopes to get a substantial piece of the estimated $211 billion publication and commercial printing market in the U.S. as of 1998. So which is it? Who knows?! We did think the news release announcing the ImageX.com online marketplace (PrintPlace.com) had an intriguing twist. Mr. Begert said his firm was developing a community based on five constituencies -- graphic artists, print consumers, corporate print buyers, commercial printers and suppliers. Earlier this week ImageX.com said it had acquired a vertical portal and supplier of e-services for creative professionals called Creativepro.com Given the inclusion of graphic designers in the PrintPlace.com group of constituencies, this deal makes real sense. ImageX, based in the Seattle suburbs, also said it now has a client roster of nearly 200 firms using ImageX to streamline their printing process. Among the clients are Amazon.com, ShopNow.com, HomeGrocer.com and InfoSpace.com Meanwhile, PaperExchange.com was adding to its roster of paper firms listing their products through PaperExchange.com's website. International Paper and Asia Pulp and Paper are two of the heavyweights newly listing. PaperExchange says it now has 3,100 corporate members from 80 countries. Think bazaar or trading post and then think about bidding on paper. Thus far, PaperExchange members have completed more than 100 transactions representing about 6,000 tons of paper. The firm lost $9 million on revenue of $114,000 in the year ended 12/31/99. Hey buddy, can you spare a dot.com? We were impressed by the Minnesota 'entrepreneur' who announced last week that his collection of 276 web domain names would now be released for sale. He expects the various names will fetch a cumulative total of $15 to 16 million in hostage fees and ransom money. (Oh sorry, that was an editorial comment on our part.) In truth, it appears that one needs to slap one or two dotcom's on the end of one's name and then file for an Initial Public Offering in the morning. On March 8th, iPrint completed its IPO at an offering price of $10 and shares promptly jumped to $28 before settling back to the $20 range they are in today. PaperExchange filed for a $115 million offering on March 13, (go back and read those financial numbers in the last item.) PaperExchange has a majority owner named Robert Kraft who also owns the New England Patriots National Football League franchise. So if you see Drew Bledsoe, the Pat's quarterback in an upcoming commercial, you'll know why! PrintCafe, Inc. filed for a $143.7 million offering on March 14th. PrintCafe didn't make money in 1999, but it does have an impressive group of clients signed up to use its technology according to the filing. Among its customers are American Airlines, Andersen Consulting, Costco and Time Warner. PrintCafe is based in Pittsburgh and says it allows online buyers to design and estimate the cost of a print job, submit job estimate requests to printers and to track the job status. PrintCafe has merged an equally impressive list of software providers to the printing industry including Hagen Systems, Logic and others. Some 6,500 printers use the firms software according to the IPO filing. Readers of TMN may recall that Creo made a $25 million investment in PrintCafe late last year. One day later, on March 15th, WAM!NET announced that it had filed for a $115 million initial public offering. WAM!NET operates a private computer network allowing firms in the graphic arts, entertainment and automotive industries to send massive files and conduct e-commerce over the Internet. WAM!NET says in its filing that it has 6,800 clients worldwide and that 16 of the 20 largest printers in the U.S. use its service, along with 11 of the top 20 publishers in the US. Many of these new IPO's are for existing firms with robust client lists and real revenues. Still one wonders at the oddities of new economy versus old economy. How can a firm like R.R. Donnelley & Sons be seen by the Wall Street poohbahs as being worth virtually the same as iPrint? In fact, Donnelley, QuecbecorWorld and iPrint are all trading in the $21 dollar range. Wacky! Drupa Previews More news keeps filtering out about what new and exciting things travelers to Dusseldorf might encounter this May. Screen says it will unveil a new digital offset press aimed at competing with the 74Karat and Omni Adast and Heidelberg's digital Speedmaster 74. Screen will also reportedly show a toner based digital copier/printer which may be twice as fast as the 135cpm Xerox DocuTech. KBA will show its Rapida 74 designed to give the world's oldest press manufacturer a product to compete against Heidelberg's Speedmaster 74. Our good friends at Independent Machinery (a three year International Gallery sponsor) are recommending several stops at Drupa to visit with their marketing partners which include the Gietz & Co booth in Hall 3, Booth B52 to watch hologram transfers, and also the Tunkers booth in Hall 14, Booth 14 C05 to check out the Univeral Pattern Gluer UAM 1400 which is well suited for swatch books among other applications. Also, our 2 year International Gallery sponsor Fuji Photo Film sends word that they will be exhibiting their new Dart Luxel T6000 CTP thermal platesetter at Drupa 2000. The unit can record plates sizes up the B2 format, and is the modular, and affordably priced little sister of Fuji's top end Javelin Luxel T9000 CTP. Bindery Blues This writer has the bindery blues. We need our gentle readers to send us some material from the back end of the process to share with our global readership. Long time TMN reader, Bryan Sachs of Standard Dynamics in Jackson, Wisconsin wrote a nice piece in the March issue of Dealer Communicator magazine and we excerpt a point from his well written article: "Another attractive selling point regarding bindery products is the relative safety of the investment compared to other items such as prepress equipment. ... While bindery equipment has and will continue to evolve, the rate of obsolesence is not nearly that which is seen in other parts of our industry. The equipment tends to hold its value for a longer period of time." Thanks Bryan! Industry Tidbits Our newest International Gallery sponsor is Collabria. The company has been on a real roll since Graph Expo. Last week, they announced an alliance with Imation to integrate Imation's Matchprint inkjet system into Collabria's eBusiness workflow. The idea is to offer a remote color proofing solution over the Internet. In addition, Imation plans to provide professional workflow consulting and systems integration services to Collabria customers beginning next month. Collabria processed 11,000 transactions in the month of January alone which shows how rapidly the e-commerce juggernaut is developing. Collabria also announced a development alliance with InDoc's this week. We think Collabria is a "new economy" firm to watch for all traditionalists in the printing business. Printware said on March 21, that it has received an order from Mission Announcement Company in Covina, CA for a complete web-to-press system, including a customized web interface, web hosting services, RIP's, platesetters and plates. Meanwhile, YARC Systems of Camarillo, CA says it wants to find a way to possibly merge with Printware. Indigo N.V. announced on March 16th that Tokyo Lithmatic Corporation of Japan, an on-demand printer with 24 branches, has installed its 19th Indigo digital color press. MAN Roland has entered into an OEM deal with Xeikon N.V., and will be the first OEM partner to market Xeikon's new sheet fed color digital press, the CSP 320 D. (Closed circuit to International Gallery Co-Chair Dan Marantz -- are you sending Mission Announcement Co., and Tokyo Lithmatic, a Call for Entries for the International Gallery?) EFI said last week that Ghilad Dziesietnik, VP of Core Technology has been elected Chairman of the Print on Demand Initiative (PODi). One of his priorities will be to promote the Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML) standard which PODi completed work upon in February. PODi is a first time International Gallery sponsor in 2000 and we especially thank Rab Govil of PODi for PODi's commitment to our premier event. Steve Ciesmier, VP at PagePath Technologies sends word that his firm's free e-commerce solution, MyOrderDesk, now has 1,900 graphic arts service providers registered to use the service. So say the least, PagePath has seen exponential growth in this offering.
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
Home |
Site Index |
About the IAPHC |
Member Services |
Club Directory |
Events Tuesday News | Gallery | Internet Tips | Industry Links | Membership Info |
 Tuesday Morning News is provided as a service to members of the International Association of Printing House Craftsmen.Membership inquiries: membership@iaphc.org Head Office: headquarters@iaphc.org or toll free 800/466-4274 Website Administration: webmaster@iaphc.org |
 |
