There was a lot of activity reported at drupa but some of the announcements were firmer than others. In this report we have held off on counting 14 of the press deals announced at drupa but I will be talking about them, and other drupa activity, in a separate article. Despite those holdbacks, this report still represents the largest single (or seasonal) installation roundup we have published with 53 presses at 51 companies representing 17 OEMs (versus 11 and 15 OEMS in the previous two reports.)

It's not surprising that we should see a big jump in numbers around drupa since many OEMs and their customers wanted to announce acquisitions there. The international nature of the event contributed to the inclusion of installation announcements from around the globe, but we also benefited from an update from contributor Oleg Litvinov on installations in Russia where we continue to see Chinese OEMs growing their business.

Firsts and Doubles

• Photoweb in France is the first in the world to purchase the new Kyocera Nixka Belhara narrow web inkjet photo printer. This is true, photo lab style production, not just including high resolution photography in books, signage or direct mail. We had to add a new category to the roll/sheet counts: “roll-photo” just for them.
• Trade Printer CMYK Hub of Australia doubled up on their purchase of the Canon varioPRINT iX3200 for producing display graphics.
• British transaction printing and direct mail company, Datagraphic also doubled up with Canon purchasing both an ix 3200 and a ColorStream 8133.
• Delta Group, also in England, picked up their third Nozomi, an EFI Nozomi 14000 SD single-pass printer for sign and display.
• Another British company, EcoFlexibles, picked up their second Fujifilm FP790 for flexible packaging after only a year.
• Miru Systems of South Korea invested in 2 HP PageWide Advantage 2200 presses to support ballot printing for the Philippine Election Commission.

By the numbers

First the where. Most of the buyers are in Western Europe (16). Next up we found 10 each in North America and England. There were 9 companies in Russia and 2 each in Australia, India and Saudi Arabia. Our previous report was also dominated by European activity.

I confess that there is one oldie in the U.S. count. We found a previously unreported COVID-era Xerox Baltoro installation and I miss seeing the Xerox name in print. I hope there will be more to report from them. There is also one holdover from 2023 but the remaining 51 installations are all 2024 activity.

We found 22 sheet fed installations and 26 roll fed, not counting the 4 roll hybrid presses and that nifty roll-photo installation that we are giving their own categories. The B1s are back, but it’s all B1-board from Nozomi for display graphics rather than B1-sheet for commercial work. There were also 7 B2 and 10 B3 presses in the count. In the web world, we found 15 2-up roll installations, 6 roll-label, 5 roll-pack, 4 roll hybrid, and the single roll-photo.

The most frequently cited application segments were commercial/graphic arts and labels each with 10 presses. The presses for the commercial segment were evenly split between sheet and roll. There were several hybrids in the label line up. Many companies are using their inkjet presses for some type of direct mail (7) or publishing (6). Check the table for display graphics, flex pack, education in-plant operations and more.

With 17 OEMs represented, I’ll highlight the frequent flyers here and you can check the table for the rest. We logged 11 from Canon, 6 from Screen, and 5 each from Haotian (all in Russia), Konica Minolta, and Ricoh.

Stay tuned for an article discussing 14 additional press sales and more about the business deals done at drupa 2024.

2024 June Roundup

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. We appreciate tips from buyers or sellers.  Send me your latest news.

You can find more details on individual press models on the Inkjet Device Finder.