The printing industry is in a severe state of recession, and few suppliers to the industry are making revenue or profit gains. In fact suppliers are disappearing in some cases, and few new suppliers are coming into the market. It is therefore a very pleasant role to welcome a new, large and very profitable supplier to the commercial printing industry. This new supplier is coming into the digital prepress area, and immediately in terms of its overall revenues becomes one of the largest suppliers in the industry. Admittedly most of those revenues are obtained in industries other than commercial printing, but they are obtained from similar products that will be sold to commercial printers.

So who is this new supplier and will they be a valuable addition to the current range of industry suppliers?

The supplier is Electronics for Imaging, or as they are better known, EFI. (And again probably better known by the brand name of their core product line, Fiery.) I can imagine many of you will say EFI is not a new supplier to the commercial printing industry, and many of you may indeed have a Fiery driving a color copier or printer. That is the case, but I doubt if any of you have ever dealt with EFI to buy the product.