Information provider World Textile Information Network (WTIN) has been tracking the growth of digital printing in the textiles industry for some time, and recently released new data. While it demonstrates that their growth projections have been on track, we still have a long way to go in the industry’s analog-to-digital transformation, with just 6% of the world’s printed textiles produced digitally. According to the company’s data, 2018 saw only a small percentage of fabric printed—although that small percentage amounted to 36 billion square meters excluding signage! And only 6% of that was produced digitally. Still, that was 2.57 billion square meters of printed fabric. But that is up from only 3.3% as of ITMA 2015, nearly doubling its share. There was an installed base of nearly 50,000 digital textile printers in 2018, up from about 27,000 in 2015. This is impressive growth when considering that the overall textiles market is growing at about 2%, according to Euler Hermes.

MS Printing Solutions and EFI Reggiani accounted for 36% of digitally printed fabric in 2018, as shown in the chart below.

The majority of digital textile printers are installed in Europe and Asia (76%), with only 10% of total installs in North America. We can expect to see the North American installed base continue to grow, especially in today’s trade war environment, another encouragement for reshoring of the industry, although clearly the bulk of production will still continue to be produced offshore for the foreseeable future. Unit growth is primarily seen in the sub-20-square-meter-per-hour printers, and the printers that can produce in excess of 650 square meters per hour—with the latter category accounting for 47% of production in 2018. At ITMA, we saw several new printers that produce in the 800 square meter per hour range. And of course, there is the workhorse EFI Reggiani BOLT that, at 90 linear meters per minute, can produce more than 8,000 square meters of high-quality printed fabric per hour. At the show, the company reported that four units had already been ordered—three in Pakistan and one in Italy—with a robust order pipeline. It remains to be seen how printers like this will ultimately affect the analog-to-digital transformation in textiles.