Arandell Corporation Completes Acquisition of Maple Grove Operations

Inkjet isn’t like other printing processes, and trying to sell it on anything other than its own terms is a recipe for failure with it. Three inkjet adopters who have learned to sell inkjet the right way freely shared the lessons they’ve learned in a heavily attended panel discussion that kicked off the second day of the 2018 Inkjet Summit. Under the moderation of Barb Pellow (Pellow & Partners), the trio emphasized that properly educating and motivating the sales force is what primarily drives success in a market where the old norms of selling - particularly selling on price - aren’t meaningful in the value proposition that inkjet presents to customers. They also noted that if a printing company wants its customers to get excited about inkjet, the service provider must communicate its own passion for the process in every pitch it makes. Click Read More below for additional information.

The next phase of growth for digital color printing will be using inkjet to print offset-quality images on coated stocks, at reasonable costs. The target applications are direct mail, catalogs, collateral and magazines. Digital color pages continue to grow nicely: up 15% in North America in 2016. Looking at the growth in more detail, one can readily see that the page volume growth is being driven by high-speed, continuous-feed color inkjet. Pages produced on webfed presses have been increasing at ~20% per year in recent years, double the rate of growth of cut-sheet pages, resulting in half of the total volume being inkjet output. So what’s being printed on these production inkjet web presses? The common denominator is documents on uncoated stock and that don’t require high-quality images: transactional documents, direct mail letters and books. The economics of transactional printing and direct mail letter printing now favor white paper feeding a full-color inkjet web press versus preprinted forms with mono laser overprinting. And, for books, the focus is shifting from the print cost per book to the cost of books sold. Click Read More below for more of the story.

It’s not a major surprise, really, that our 38th annual ranking of the largest printing industry companies in the U.S. and Canada, as ranked by annual sales, is now the 2021 Printing Impressions 300 — and not the Printing Impressions 350 that appeared in 2020. After all, the majority of the graphic arts businesses on our venerable list reported their calendar 2020 annual sales as their most recent fiscal year, with calendar 2019 representing their previous year sales. Given the onslaught, and subsequent shutdowns, of many segments of the U.S. economy beginning in March 2020 due to COVID-19, it’s understandable that CEOs of commercial printing companies were not racing to report their annual sales numbers. And, although the printing industry was ultimately deemed “essential,” many of the vertical markets that these primarily privately-held printing businesses serve were not. Combine that with all the business uncertainty among marketers, brand owners, retailers, and other print buyers, it’s no surprise that many companies appearing on our 2021 list in this issue reported double-digit annual revenue drops.