This article should have been written late last year, but was postponed because of all the activities surrounding Creo and its developments, leading up to the planned acquisition of the company by Kodak. This article is about Esko-Graphics, however, the Creo developments are interesting as they show links to recent decisions made within Esko-Graphics. The reason for writing this article is the decision of Esko-Graphics to withdraw from the manufacture and distribution of its PlateDriver line of visible light CtP engines. The PlateDriver line of 4, 6 and 8 page format engines was at the time of the creation of Esko-Graphics one of the cornerstones of the company’s business strategy. Within two years of the merger this major area of the company’s business is being withdrawn. This is the first time I had seen a major player in the industry make such a significant change of strategy without being forced into it, and I wanted to look into this in detail to assess why it was being done.

What I found was that the offset CtP market for commercial printers was changing incredibly quickly. This goes back to my earlier comment about links with Creo. Creo had found that to succeed in selling into commercial and newspaper CtP, it was necessary to be in control of the plate distribution channels. In building up its plate business, Creo changed the business dynamics of the industry by forcing down profit margins for supplying CtP devices. This was brought about by pushing lower plate prices to support selling its CtP engines at a very low profit. Esko-Graphics found that without a consumables business to generate ongoing revenues, that selling high-performance CtP engines hardly covered the company’s costs. The company saw that this situation was likely to continue, as the distribution of CtP became more and more a totally consumable driven business under the control of Agfa, Fujifilm and Kodak. Recently, Esko-Graphics has also announced that it will not be bringing its Espresso conventional plate CtP system to market. This again reflects the market situation. Esko-Graphics sees the window of opportunity for conventional plate imaging has almost closed in the past year. It sees that bringing Espresso to market, and also a follow up family of products, would not be a good business investment. It should invest instead in areas where it can consolidate its market leading positions.

Luckily for Esko-Graphics, the major part of its business is as the industry market leader in what it terms the pre-production area of the packaging market. The company is the leading supplier of total industry solutions of hardware and software for this market. In one area of this market the company is also the dominant supplier of CtP devices for flexo plates. It claims that 90% of all digital flexo plates imaged are produced on Esko-Graphics CDI flexo imaging units. The packaging and label printing market is also perhaps the only area of printing that shows significant growth.