One of the major announcements of the past week came from Agfa. This was made at the FESPA exhibition in Munich, Germany and concerned Agfa’s announcements in the ink jet printing area. In February 2004 Agfa announced its intention to become a leading player in the industrial inkjet business. This announcement followed Agfa’s acquisition of Dotrix and it’s The.Factory industrial ink jet press. At FESPA Agfa added some more meat to its previous announcement with a range of new inkjet printing systems, as well as a range of Agfa manufactured inks. Agfa is essentially a consumables company selling film and plates, and it sees the future growth of inkjet will generate a huge demand for inks. It also wants to control all the key components of inkjet systems. In this it either develops or has relationships with key suppliers of print engines, printheads and imaging software.

Agfa however is not alone in deciding that inkjet printing has great potential for business growth. In recent months many other key industry suppliers have also made announcements of their plans to become key participants in the growth of ink jet printing. Kodak has defined industrial inkjet printing as a core business for the future. It first acquired Encad with its wide format printers, and later acquired the Versamark operation that was previously Scitex Digital Printing. It has a massive development under way to bring its STREAM continuous inkjet technology to market within the next three years. Kodak is already a supplier of inkjet inks for its Encad operation, and plans major expansion of this business for its future continuous inkjet heads.

In January this year Fujifilm made its move into the inkjet printing market with the acquisition of UK supplier Sericol. Sericol is not an inkjet company but is one of the leading suppliers of speciality inks for the screen-printing industry. It is however a leading industrial inkjet printing systems supplier with exclusive distribution rights for the leading large format flatbed inkjet printing systems manufacturer, Inca Digital. Fujifilm in its usual fashion has made few announcements of plans to become an inkjet player.

If one listens to the “gossip” at conferences and exhibitions one can pick up what may be clues to some plans. One rumor tells of a development proceeding together with inkjet printhead supplier Tonejet. Tonejet is a co-development between RLA in Australia and The Technology Partnership in the UK to produce a grayscale high performance printhead. The rumor is that Fujifilm is working with RLA to develop a digital printer and an inkjet CtP device. With unsubstantiated rumors one can never tell if there is any truth in them. Fujifilm does however have a tremendous breadth of technology, and it is unlikely it would have bought into a specialist ink supplier if it did not have something in development to back this up.