(Watch the second installment of our “Road to drupa” video series here.)  

Unlike production cut-sheet production inkjet sales, which were negatively impacted by high interest rates in 2023, long sales cycles in continuous-feed inkjet and, more importantly, high print volumes negate the impact of the cost of hardware on a per page basis and make this market less susceptible to interest rates. The market saw a slight rise in continuous-feed inkjet engine sales in 2023 for the first time in about five years, mostly attributable to growth in the high-end and graphics arts segments. 

With offset document and publishing pages declining about 4–5% annually, IT Strategies projects that by 2029 continuous feed inkjet pages will account for about 12.5% of total worldwide volume of output (800 billion CF inkjet pages/7,000B pages total).

By comparison, cut-sheet inkjet pages are projected to account for only about 2% of all document and publishing offset and digital pages printed by 2029. The productivity of continuous feed is a benefit that is unmatched by cut-sheet inkjet. 

The high-end continuous-feed inkjet segment benefited from strong growth among book manufacturers and consolidation of transaction page volumes on fewer but more productive machines. The graphic arts segment showed the strongest growth: the technology has proven to be able to replace offset and existing customers are frequently adding second or third units to drive print volumes and high-margin revenue in direct mail and specialty applications. 

As the increases in cost of postage and paper continue to outpace the cost of print, the old economies of scale benefits from printing no longer apply. In fact, IT Strategies believes that for certain applications like direct mail there is more price elasticity in charging more for print than ever before, provided that the content of the direct mail piece provides a measurable positive return-on-investment.  This turns the legacy business model upside down, as the focus shifts 180º away from volume towards 100% value-add. Large direct mailers experienced a 15% drop in volume from 2022 to 2023, but as they moved more pages from low-value offset to high-value production inkjet printing they saw revenues increase despite the decline in pages printed.

Few print markets offer nearly 20% growth rates; as offset print volumes decline faster, for production inkjet technology the upside could potentially be much higher still. There is no longer a question about whether production inkjet image quality is good enough to replace offset. Chasing those offset pages may not be the right answer however. The commercial print industry overall is in a stage of decline, which means the legacy business models of chasing ever higher print volumes to gain economies of scale no longer works, and in fact hasn’t worked for a decade or more. What does work is shifting the remaining pages over to higher-value pages. A business model of fewer pages, but at higher value per page, if done well, can result in significantly higher revenues for commercial printers. That’s the recipe for future success for commercial printers, enabled by production inkjet technology.