Cary Sherburne and David Zwang spoke with Benoit Chatelard, President & CEO of Flint Digital Solutions, and Marc or Marcus Brussel, the organization’s CFO, to gain additional insight into the EFI/Xeikon partnership announced last week whereby responsibility for sales, marketing and service of Jetrion inkjet label presses was transferred to Xeikon. Brussel has been with Xeikon since October of 2016 after 20 years with Canon/Océ in Venlo, the Netherlands. As our readers will recall, Chatelard joined the Flint Group in May of this year after many years with IBM/Ricoh, some months after the EFI negotiations commenced.

WTT:  Benoit, can you give your thoughts on the EFI/Xeikon Jetrion deal?

BC:  The negotiations with EFI were happening in parallel with the launch of Panther, our UV inkjet label press family. We knew we needed to accelerate our inkjet go-to-market strategy.  The strategic partnership with EFI was a way for us to quickly get critical market share. Jetrion has the largest installed base in UV inkjet for labels in the world, and together with Panther, market share will be even bigger, giving us critical size because of the natural business that will occur. And we are also transferring some folks [from EFI] to increase our inkjet knowledge base. Jetrion also gave us a stronger foothold in the U.S. label market, an additional goal. It was two birds with one stone.