HP Indigo delivered strong performance in 2021 and the team headed out to Colorado for DSCOOP 2022 armed with enthusiasm and lots of new news. In this sponsored interview created from written answers provided by HP Indigo, Senior Vice President & General Manager, HP Indigo and Industrial Go To Market, Haim Levit, shares an update and a look ahead.

WhatTheyThink:  What can you tell us about the last two years? How did you do as a business? Trends that you see impacting our industry?

Haim Levit:  There is no doubt that, like others in the industry, vendors and customers alike, we also took a hit in the earlier stages of COVID-19, but we bounced back immediately. We identified the rapid changes in the market; and we responded to them, eventually leading to the best two years we’ve had in our history from a growth perspective.

The market around us has changed and shifted towards localization, personalization, e-commerce, short runs, and automation. We saw the rapid rise of local micro brands and a sharp increase in on-demand personalized goods in the labels and packaging space. We also saw the continuation of the inkjet momentum in publishing, direct mail and high-volume commercial pages. We understood that this is the time to fire on all cylinders and help our customers to leverage the change in market trends.

Our strategy and game plan were very clear. First, we did everything in our power to help our customers at the heart of the pandemic. We came out with significant relief programs that helped many of our customers and channel partners to go through the rough waters.

In parallel, we took a critical market leadership decision to move forward and release our Drupa portfolio when many others decided to wait or scale down. We launched new solutions that span multiple segments, Commercial (Indigo 100K, 15K), Labels (Spot Master), Flexible Packaging (Indigo 25K and the pouch factory), Folding Cartons (Indigo 35K), the Indigo Secure solutions aimed for the security print market, the HP T250 HD and HP Brilliant Ink in production inkjet and significant advancements in workflow and automation.

We also launched virtual events and an innovative communication platform so we could still broadcast to our customers including virtual demo experiences. As a result, our net new placements started to pick up reaching historic levels we’ve never seen before. In labels and packaging, for example, we see our customers adding capacity buying their 2nd, 3rd and 4th presses, trying to deliver against the market demand. We also saw outstanding momentum in the high-volume inkjet markets on both Commercial and Publishing, leading to multiple unit placements.

Simultaneously, we accelerated our efforts to create advanced remote support and predictive care systems that have substantially improved the customer experience and allowed us to support our customer even in the very early days of COVID when travel was almost impossible. 

The last 2 years were definitely complex for our customers and for us, but resilience, clear strategy, agility and deep partnership with our customers enabled us to deliver remarkable growth, selling more than 1,200 presses into the market, capturing outstanding amounts of incremental pages.

WTT:   What’s the status of the commercial and L&P businesses? How do you see the future?

HL:  The Commercial market saw a big drop during the pandemic and is still not fully recovered, mostly in the travel, leisure and gaming segments, and that will probably take some time to recover. However, pockets in the market saw growth, especially when it comes to analog to digital conversion as a result of the localization and personalization trends and the challenges around offset media availability. In Publishing, high-speed Inkjet has seen a great momentum across the board.

When it comes to the Labels & Packaging business, we really saw the market booming, and our sales have been simply phenomenal. The market trends and the quest of the brands to differentiate themselves from each other have created an outstanding opportunity for HP. We placed more than 500 presses in this market segment, and we are leading the digital labels & packaging market with more than 70% market share. In the next few months, we will disrupt the labels market again with the Indigo V12 press that will have 6X the productivity we have today.

When it comes to Flexible Packaging, while the digital transformation is just starting, we already see amazing success stories like e-Pac, which I’m sure most of your readers have heard of … an account that saw the advantage of the only real end-to-end digital flexible packaging solution in the market and decided to open up franchises around the globe. ePac today has close to 60 Indigo 20000’s and Indigo 25K’s.

WTT:  How do you support your customers with increased automation, even more important with the difficulty many companies have attracting and retaining talent?

HL:  Automation is an important trend, especially in a post-COVID world where labor rates and availability of resources is limited, and efficiency is even more important. While this is still in early stages in our industry, HP has decided to put a lot of focus on automation and is already delivering a range of solutions that help our customers automate their production floors, increase quality and better serve their end users and brands.

Our PrintOS platform includes an ecosystem of Industry 4.0 tools that are being used by more than 4,000 of our customers on a daily basis. Print beat, color beat, siteflow, OEE, service XR, and others are only few of the tools HP is bringing to the advanced factories of today and the future to promote automation, multi-site and fleet uniformity, save labor costs, reduce waste and improve time to market.

WTT:  What new product news are you bringing to DSCOOP 2022?

HL:  The message we are bringing to DSCOOP is a message of continued growth, the strength of our business, the resilience of our customers, the power of the DSCOOP community and the partnership between HP, DSCOOP and our customers that is basically leading the digital print transformation.

We will be talking about some impressive milestones we’ve achieved. We already sold more than 100 x Indigo 100K presses since launch, but the bigger story is the attractiveness of the B2 format in the market … we already have more than 1,300 active B2 presses in the market that are playing a major role in transforming analog pages to digital.

From a new product perspective, we are announcing the 5th color station and the Auto Pallet Replacement (APR) for the Indigo 100K, the commercial availability of the all new Indigo 15K, and HP Spark, which is the next generation of the award winning Mosaic and Collage solutions. We will also be showing some new inks and future developments from our R&D labs.

We will talk a lot about sustainability and HP’s mission to become the most sustainable company on the planet. Sustainability is much more than a slogan or trend, it’s our way to return back and care for our planet. Beyond the basic level of printing only what you need when you need it, we provide another unique layer of sustainable options such as circular printing, recycling of spare parts, ability to use recycled and/or bio-degradable substrates, etc. In fact, we have quite few amazing campaigns running with leading global brands such as Hershey, that are also leveraging sustainability as a driver to impact communities, minorities, diversity and making this world a more equal place for all of us.

WTT:  What’s the latest DSCOOP news?

HL:  DSCOOP is a phenomenon that is really hard to explain. It’s by far the largest users community in the industry and definitely the longest lasting one, and I’m proud to be part of such a community. During pandemic it was simply amazing to see how our members shared knowledge, ideas and new business opportunities around the world.

DSCOOP serves as a platform for education, networking, sharing best practices and forming partnerships that otherwise are impossible to create. DSCOOP delivers constant content virtually and face to face to its members to keep them up to date with trends and happenings in our industry. It creates a strong sense of belonging for its members and a unique sense of family. The annual conventions are a celebration of innovation, learning, networking and fun. In pre-COVID years, we used to see more than 3,000 participants in the annual conventions. The surprising fact is that during the last 2 years, over 12,000 members participated in the different virtual events that took place. We were expecting a much smaller event this year due to ongoing uncertainty but I’m excited to share that we have over 700 registered attendees. Our members can’t wait to connect back to each other through this amazing platform.

Our solutions partners are another integral part of our ecosystem and the DSCOOP community. This unique structure allows our partners to stay closely connected to our customers and even interact with other partners themselves. That unique relationship fuels growth and innovation. It brings up ideas that later become solutions we deliver to the market and ultimately help create cutting-edge end-to-end automated printing solutions. I have no doubt that these relationships will keep getting stronger.

HP's bond with DSCOOP is the most significant growth generator we have had in our history. Even more so, this relationship is creating partnerships for growth that go far beyond the transactional part of selling presses. We form long lasting relationships that are based on trust and common goals. Our customers appreciate that, and together we are writing the history of the digital print revolution.

WTT:  Anything else you would like to add before we close?

HL:  Yes, I would like to use this opportunity to thank our customers for allowing us to partner with them in this journey. We never take them for granted, and we remain committed to this deep bond we have with our customers and partners. We are committed to continuing to listen, collaborate, respect and deliver the most innovative solutions that will allow our customers to grow.

I would like to acknowledge our incredible employees who spent days and nights making sure we successfully got through this period. They worked in impossible conditions and took risks, but they never lost sight of the customers and the goals we set for ourselves.

I know COVID is still around us, and some of our customers are still fighting to recover. Still, I’m proud of what HP has achieved in the past couple of years, I’m proud and honored of the partnerships we created with our customers. I’m grateful to be part of a fantastic company that remains committed to leading the digital print transformation.