The hottest technology at present in this industry is high-speed continuous feed inkjet printing. It drew the greatest level of interest at the recent IPEX event where a number of new systems were introduced. While all the interest in this area is on the suppliers and where the presses are being sold, there is one printer that could be said to be years ahead of its competitors in this area of the market. This printer is RR Donnelley, the world’s largest commercial printer. RR Donnelley has been both an innovator and market leader and in the area of digital printing it has been ahead of the curve in all aspects of digital printing. In fact around the world, where it has operations in North and South America, Europe, China and India, it has more than 1,000 digital imaging devices in operation. It saw the potential of inkjet printing technology in changing the dynamics of the market at an early stage and at that time did not see any supplier producing the kind of presses it was looking for.

RR Donnelley was seeing the market dynamics changing in many areas. In the book publishing area it was finding that 25% of printed books never get to consumers and need to be pulped. It was seeing both the rise of e-books and increasing demand for very short-run book printing. In the transactional printing area it was seeing more demand for color with up to 40% of pages having a color component. It was also seeing changes in the direct marketing area with increases in variable data moving from just changes in text to graphical changes on pages.

At IPEX recently I was asked to help organize and to moderate an invitation only event for Cabot Corporation, one of the leading suppliers of colorants for the inkjet printing industry. At this event we had Dr Ronnie Sarker, Senior Vice President of the Digital Solutions Group of RR Donnelley presenting the company’s inkjet printing strategy to a large number of leading printers from around the world.