Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I’m delighted to be here with my good friend Hamilton Costa of AN Consulting from Brazil. Welcome.

Hamilton Costa: Thank you, Cary. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you.

Cary Sherburne: Thank you. And I wanted to see if you could update our viewers on what’s going on in the printing industry in Latin America. What are kind of some of the trends you’re seeing? Are you growing? Are you suffering? What’s going on?

Hamilton Costa: Well, we see both things, you know. It’s interesting to see – I wouldn’t say interesting but we can see that in both things. I mean, you have parts of market growing fast, new niches and new opportunities. At the same time some traditional parts suffering a little bit with more competition because I have more plants updated. That way they have big offer and so if you take Brazil for instance, the most developed part of Brazil where they’re located most part of the printing plants are suffering much more competition than those new areas they’re really growing faster in Brazil.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Hamilton Costa: So when you see all the people at different points of the country you see different point of views. Each one of them see the market in a different way so we see small companies to middle companies sometimes growing faster than big companies. The same thing you see in other countries in Latin America. Some countries suffering a bit in specific markets like book markets in Columbia because of exports and the demand are not growing the way they think it should grow. And so we see both things at same time. It’s better than European markets. I’d say it’s quite a bit like the North America today that’s performed a little bit better than the best. But for the specific natures of the market it’s a very good time.

Cary Sherburne: So do you see a longer life for the older technologies in Latin America? Digital’s coming in and people are gonna have to have a hybrid offset digital platform but do you see a longer life just because of the nature of what’s going on?

Hamilton Costa: Yeah, we see many new machines as they’ve been replaced and decide. You have to understand we are getting more consumers in the market consuming traditional products because that’s why we still have demand for that. At the same time our pretty new niches so that’s the same thing that we had the opportunity to talk when some days we’re talking about Drupa. There the people could see innovation on one side and more productivity – how to get more productivities on the other side. So those are – in this side of the business they have to be more productive.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah.

Hamilton Costa: Not only changing machines but thinking the best way to run the business.

Cary Sherburne: Right.

Hamilton Costa: And the other side to think how to transform the business and get more innovations around it. To follow their customer needs.

Cary Sherburne: So it can be a struggle and it’s not an easy decision to make. So – but I’m sure that you’re helping them along with trying to make those decisions. So…

Hamilton Costa: We hope.

Cary Sherburne: Thanks for sharing your insights on Latin America.

Hamilton Costa: Thank you.