Pat Henry:  This is Pat Henry from WhatTheyThink.com at a Pre IPEX media briefing in Brussels, Belgium, March 8, 2010.  With us this morning is Carsten Knudsen.  Mr. Knudsen is CEO of EskoArtwork.  Mr. Knudsen, thank you for joining us this morning. 

Carsten Knudsen:  You’re welcome. 

Pat Henry:  First, I would like to ask you about IPEX 2010, what kind of a show do you anticipate it will be?  Do you think the attendance will be good?  What are you preparing for?

Carsten Knudsen:  We are preparing for a great show.  We have a lot of interest from customers asking us what it is we want to show up there, so we see a great participation in our stand.  We will show a lot of interesting stuff; more about that later on, but that also brings to the height for us around IPEX as we believe it. 

Pat Henry:  Mr. Knudsen, this morning, your representatives, and there were seven EskoArtwork representatives briefing us this morning and told us about many things.  A lot of advances in creative software, but workflow automation as well, again, particularly aimed at packaging.  Can you recap what we were told this morning? 

Carsten Knudsen:  Yes.  We started packaging workflow automation very narrowly, but have expanded that very significantly over time, as we showed this morning, going all the way from idea up from the design and all the way to the press.  That is today one integrated workflow.  And this is how we see the future of the workflow for packaging, not only for packaging, actually for commercial print we launch similar things where the automation, where the **** is key criteria for an efficient operation.  That was one thing. 

We focus very much on automation as well.  Automation not only of workflows and of digital data, but also watching processes as digital converting, and we will launch a fully automated digital converting solutions.  We will show our highly regarded HD Flexor, including UV inline and end of production – complete production work. 

Pat Henry:  Now, your In Focus Business Unit had announcements as well.  One I found of particular interest.  A solution that we were told will eliminate preflighting problems in PDF’s that have not been made to printer specifications.  How are you going to lick that problem? 

Carsten Knudsen:  We have seen that from visiting many of our printers.  The biggest problem they have is that the fonts coming in does not work, is not printable.  And for that reason, we have walked one step back into the value achieved.  This is the product you saw pre-announced today and that will have full release at the time of the IPEX here. 

Pat Henry:  And finally, you did mention this morning that EskoArtwork, like many companies in the industry, had had a somewhat difficult year on 2009, but that you had come out of 2009 with some bright spots.  And what are those bright spots? 

Carsten Knudsen:  First, fourth quarter was good.  Fourth quarter came back to the levels which we’d seen in previous years, and we actually continue to see that ****, so first and second quarter this year we are back to 2008 levels.  So, we are – I don’t believe we are over the crisis, I don’t believe we are through the crisis, but on the other hand, we see a lot of activities from our customers buying products. 

Looking at areas, it’s workflow that we see great interest in; it’s HD Flexor Solutions that we see great interest in.  Asia has performed extremely well last year; Europe has performed extremely well right now.  So, it’s lots better that the increases and the good business that we see.

Pat Henry:  Well, that’s good news from EskoArtwork, and that means good news for the industry.  And we thank you for sharing it with us this morning. 

Carsten Knudsen:  Thank you very much. 

Pat Henry:  Pat Henry, WhatTheyThink.  Thanks for watching.