2025 PREDICTIONS 32 email: editor@printmonthly.co.uk January / February 2025 - Issue 352 larity next year. It offers many advantages over rigid media because it is much lighter, easier to transport, and significantly reduces shipping costs. There’s a big difference between handling a 5m rolled-up banner or 3m x 1m board and one that is folded up and put into a small box. This becomes particularly beneficial for the grand-format print suppliers. Thanks to manufacturers like Liyu, who produce 3.2m+ machines that are more affordable than before while maintaining high quality and speeds. This creates new opportunities for smaller print companies to expand their offering and take on larger projects. With all this investment in new printing technology, ensuring you have a fast, simple supply of all the media you need is critical. Innotech has recently invested in its warehousing to help meet this demand and ensure we can deliver our full range of products with same or next-day delivery throughout the country. Not so much a change, but a continuation of industry challenges will no doubt continue in 2025. This includes the global economy, workforce shortages, over capacity and competition with other digital channels, and much more. We believe that automation and AI will continue to be essential in driving production efficiencies, lowering waste and increasing environmental awareness, increasing profitability and ensuring the long-term success of the industry. In terms of Landa, we already have AI within our new Landa S11 and S11P presses, which became commercially available for the first time at drupa 2024. The new presses offer a new PrintAI module which enhances print quality even further. It ensures a perfect fit for even the most demanding folding cartons and commercial print applications requiring micro text and other brand protection features – it opens the door to additional profit generating opportunities for many businesses. Increased sustainability while improving profitability is another key theme that will continue throughout 2025. This is where Landa’s Nanography really wins, as it eliminates printing plates and greatly reduces setup paper waste, alongside reducing job setup time to almost nil. Another factor to consider is substrate independence. Nanography is able to produce ultra-high-quality printing on any paper stock – from the most expensive to the cheapest uncoated paper – providing the same results on each and enabling much more sustainable stocks to be chosen. We will also undoubtedly see continued introduction of solutions to further automate, to make printers and converters more competitive and profitable, and materials such as new boards and coating to address environmental concerns. Our priority continues to be the delivery of presses to customers around the world. Innovation is at the heart of our business, and we are continuously refining our technology and looking for ways to improve what we do. As technological advancements within customisation and personalisation continue, and as printers move further towards ‘print of one ’models, print service providers are having to keep up with this demand in order to remain competitive and profitable. As a result, an increasing number of printers are implementing web-to-print systems to sell print online, ensuring they can efficiently handle this increase in production and maximise revenue opportunities. Next to “traditional” e-commerce, the platform economy is increasingly impacting business and production in print. Print or creator platforms like Canva, CloudPrinter, Etsy, Gelato, Gooten, Printify, and others are pushing Print Service Providers (PSPs) to rethink the way they do business and organise their production. The main driver for that is a shift from mass production to mass customisation pushed by those platforms. This doesn’t need to be a scary prospect for print businesses – whilst the volume of print is decreasing, print is becoming more valuable with the opportunities for diversification into new revenue streams within print only growing. In today’s print economy, the term ‘webto-print’ is no longer representative of the evolving requirements of print buyers and brands. With orders simply coming in through multiple online sources, whether that is an open or a closed webshop, a brand portal, or a print or creator platform – it’s now a case of ‘web-to-anything you want to personalise’. In line with this shift, we expect to see a greater adoption of cloud-based tools and platforms within print production in order for systems to be more interconnected. A major hot topic across the print industry and further afield has been, and continues to be, AI. Within the print industry specifically, we predict AI to become increasingly used in the form of chatbots for customer service, within image and video creation, within print production in the form of pixel creation, and for smarter print layouts and ganging/nesting. This growing adoption of AI within print production is complementary to the shift to cloud-based technologies, enabling print service providers to remain competitive and become even more profitable and efficient. Nir Zarmi, senior vice president of growth & strategy at Landa Digital Printing Tom Peire, chief executive officer at Four Pees and chief evangelist at Atomyx With orders simply coming in through multiple online sources, whether that is an open or a closed webshop, a brand portal, or a print or creator platform – it’s now a case of ‘web-toanything you want to personalise'
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