The economy survey was commissioned by Fespa and carried out by its research partner InfoTrends on behalf of its global wide-format community.

The main objective of the survey is to collect valuable insight into market trends and gauge business outlook for 2012 and beyond. The information was gathered from 225 respondents who are engaged in wide-format printing from across the world.

“The findings are very encouraging for Fespa Digital 2012 event to be held fro February 21 to 24 in Barcelona as it will provide grounds for print service providers to explore the wider opportunities,” said Neil Felton, managing director at Fespa.

The results of the survey brought to focus the following trends:

• The printers are estimating an average expected growth of 14.5 for their business in following year.
• The end of year sales 2011 as accounted by 20.4% of respondents was better than expected, whereas a fifth said it was better than 2010, and 40% reported that they did as expected.
• The primary reason for the branch off, as let known by a third of respondents is to house different media along with a wider range of applications with output quality and running costs being the other top criteria. 
• While a UV-curable inkjet printer was the highest area of investment, latex and other durable aqueous inkjet printer seconded the list.
• Green printing, customer demand in applications requiring white ink printing, variable data printing has seen an increase in demand as accounted by printers in the survey.