It’s be a while since we have had any news from Delphax, who presented Elan at drupa and discussed its status in our follow-up interview with Delphax CEO Dieter Schilling on video. I have been hearing a few rumors about a slow-down in the Elan development process.  When I received an email on the subject from a colleague in China, I thought I should follow up to see what’s up. As our readers will remember, Delphax Elan is a full-color production inkjet press using Memjet heads with a selling price of about $500,000, a much lower cost than other production inkjet market participants. More product specifics can be found in a WhatTheyThink article written by David Zwang just before drupa.

WTT:  Dieter, perhaps we can start with a financial update and then move on to the latest Elan news.

DS:  We have been funding Elan development out of our current business operations and have always planned to raise additional capital to do a proper launch and to gear up manufacturing to build Elan units in volume. With development not quite finished, investors want a lot bigger slice of the pie for the additional development risk than when you are launching a product with orders in hand.  We have talked with quite a number of investor candidates who are excited about our story and willing to put up money when we are ready to launch the product.  We believe additional capital will be available on more favorable terms at that time.