Tete-a-tete with Frank Romano

Inkjet outlook
Inkjet is doing better than expected. There’s a lot of competition but it is doing very well. Look at EFI. If EFI had not gotten into inkjet it would not have been a billion-dollar company. Getting into inkjet was the right decision that they have made.

EFI in inkjet
Printers have realised that they can no longer grow with paper-based printing. They have to print on other substrates. As a result, they are looking into fabrics, plastics, metals, and anything esoteric that people will pay a premium for.

Wide-format is perhaps the wrong term because wide-format can only handle flexible materials limited to signage. What EFI is selling here is large-format printing angels that can print on three-dimensional objects and things like that. That’s what this company has nicely done.

Advise to printers
So industrial inkjet or whatever people name it, that’s where the growth is going to be. And so my advise to printing companies is: you need to get one of these machines and start building the market. It’s going to take you a while to figure out where to sell this stuff, but once your sales force is oriented to selling these, it’s going to be the turning point for the print businesses.

On packaging
Packaging is the one industry you cannot the internet cannot replace. So that's going to grow and because companies are creating more and more, brands need more different packages. And because now most of them are global companies their packaging is worldwide. The only thing that will change is - the country-specific regulations for reporting nutritional information and safety norms.