RESTON, VA (August 17, 2008) Have you ever wondered where the concentration of book printers is in North America?  What about how large the market is for blankets in the Northeast?  How about how much ink is consumed by the newspaper printer?  These and numerous other queries are answered in a new PRIMIR study completed by State Street Consultants (Boston, MA) entitled, Benchmarking 2006 North American Printers & Consumables.  This new study provides volumes of statistics about all size printers in a variety of markets and geographic regions.

Principally, the study benchmarked the 2006 consumption of paper, ink, blankets, toner and plates for approximately 57,000 sites in the U.S. and Canada in the market segments covered by this study at the end of 2006.  Statistics are provided by geographic region (country, state/province, U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area [MSA], and U.S. 3-digit zip) and by market segment.  Sites using printing presses, digital production presses, and/or wide format printers were evaluated and grouped into various market segments, including commercial printers, in-plant printers, newspaper printers, catalog printers, book printers, directory printers and digital imaging services.

This new quantitative report serves as a valuable tool for strategic planning, new market or territory development, sales and marketing management, financial or resource planning.  The statistics are of immense value for all sorts of cross analysis.

A major tool from this study is a complex user-modifiable model developed in Microsoft Access where users can personalize and update the model for their own purposes and keep it fresh as time moves on to reflect changes in the marketplace.  The model contains a wealth of information and users with Microsoft Access skills will be able to:

- Increase or decrease the number of sites

- Change the penetration of an equipment category

- Change the average number of units/total units

- Change the consumption per site amounts

- Run ad hoc queries to export data to Excel for custom analysis, and

- Group U.S. 3-digit zip, U.S. MSA, state, or province, into larger groups to estimate potential.

The study, Benchmarking 2006 North American Printers & Consumables, was distributed exclusively to PRIMIR and NPES members in early 2008.  For membership information, contact Jackie Bland, PRIMIR Managing Director at e-mail: [email protected], or phone: 703/264-7200, x 211.  Membership information is also available online at: www.primir.org.