March was crazy with 44 installations and June is shaping up to be busy with all the drupa purchase announcements but there was still plenty to report for April and May. This report includes 26 installations at 24 companies. One of the presses was installed in 2022 and we have broken out the (2) hybrid presses from the sheet and roll reporting.

What “springs’ to mind?

• We are continuing to see lots of activity in the inkjet label market with Screen, Durst, and Domino all logging multiple installations. Nearly 40% of the presses were dedicated to label printing.
• After reporting 7 B1 press installs in March, we had none to report in April or May.
• We haven’t had a new report of a Xerox Baltoro installation since 2023 despite a lot of B3 activity (doesn’t mean they don’t exist) but we did find one from 2022 that we hadn’t previously reported at American Woodmen Insurance.
• Admail West is scheduled to install the new Screen Truepress Jet 560HDX (not yet delivered) to replace the Truepress JET 520HD that has been ticking along for seven years.
• New Hampshire U.S.-based Amherst Label, which is part of the Inovar Packaging Group, picked up a Domino N610i digital UV label press as well as an MPS EF Symjet hybrid flexo inkjet press that uses Domino inkjet technology. This is the second MPS hybrid for the company.
• Multi-Post in The Netherlands has added a third Kyocera TASKalfa 15000c to their inkjet fleet producing for producing customer communications and direct mail.
• The first U.S. installation of the Canon ProStream 3160 has gone to Specialty Print Communications in Illinois. SPC had previously invested in multiple continuous and sheet-fed presses from Canon.
• Three Z, also in Illinois, picked up two Canon ProStream 3000 presses with Hunkeler cut stack finishing lines.

By the numbers

This report is almost exclusively European (15) and U.S. (10) with a single press in South Africa to report. I expect that we will see some more news from APAC following drupa. That always expands the list of OEMs to report on as well. Speaking of OEMs, we had 11 OEMs on the list as compared to 15 last month. Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, Mark Andy, MPS, Ricoh, and Xerox each made the list with a single installation. Canon (7) and Screen (6) topped the list.

In the table below you will find more roll (16) than sheet (8) with a tie between the 2-up variety and the roll-label presses. There were 6 B3 format presses, including the Baltoro from 2022, and only a couple of B2s.

Most of the companies not using their press for labels most were offering some combination of direct mail, commercial and books/publications. There were also a couple offering customer communications but there was a distinct lack of packaging activity to report. I’m going to have to dig a bit deeper for June since it’s likely that some activity got lost in the drupa shuffle.

Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that this is not a market size report and we only include the press installations that we have been made aware of directly, or that have been publicly reported.

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2024 April May Roundup