On May 29 I wrote an article about HIP replacements. In this case it was about the planned Home Information Packs, a UK Government initiative to help simplify the buying of houses. In this I stated it had generated a potential huge new business for digital printing with a number of new companies starting tin order to capitalize upon what was seen as a major market opportunity. As with many Government initiatives it was badly conceived and even more badly implemented causing friction among the property professionals who complained it would do nothing to help sale of houses apart from making it more expensive. The Government did as all Governments would do in such circumstances in that they delayed the launch of the HIPs and reduced their scope. HIPs actually became a necessary item if one requires to sell a house in England and Wales from August 1, provided that house is a largish house. So far houses with less than four bedrooms are exempt from needing a HIP.

We have seen the first major repercussion of this. In my earlier article I stated that many companies had acquired batteries of digital presses to produce these HIPs. The major one of these was a brand new company First Sellers Pack (FSP), that amazingly acquired ten Kodak Nexpress 2100 presses to produce the expected volume of HIPs that they predicted would be needed. Well last week FSP went into administration (the equivalent of Chapter 11) laying the blame for this firmly on the government. They stated with the two-month delay in start of HIPs it had cost the firm around $500,000 a week in revenues. Obviously the Government’s back pedaling has caused a major problem but surely building a business from scratch with such a huge production capacity based upon a Government plan was somewhat optimistic particularly as this was their only product. Other digital printers that re-equipped for the HIP market said that the Government’s delays had not helped but they were still operating well as they were not totally reliant on the HIP market. In the digital business it obviously doesn’t pay to pin one’s hopes to a Government strategy and put all one’s eggs in one basket.

My final comment in my previous article was “It will however be interesting to see what happens during the next few months, and whether possibly there may be a number of relatively unused digital presses on the second-hand market.” It is understood that the appointed administrator for FSP is planning to sell the business. Does anyone want 10 almost unused one-owner Kodak Nexpress 2100 presses?