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Questions and Answers

Will the outsourcing trend also increase the number of customer on-site copy and print centers as sold mostly by Xerox and IKON?

This is often a function of size of the business, and it is more and more likely that small businesses that become larger will retain their use of channels like Staples, OfficeMax, etc., and with those channels growing into these themselves. The larger question is whether or not things will need to be copied or printed at all. Remember, all office suites (as soon as Microsoft Office 2007 comes out) will have PDF-making built in (MS Office is the only one that doesn't, currently). Avoiding print totally saves more money than outsourcing could ever do. That said, these companies will do better in the long run with document management services that are fully electronic than producing hard copy. Some markets will be slow to adopt, like big legal and big medical, but I don't see outsourcing for hard copy print purposes as being as robust as it was.

What type of applications do you think are primarily being printed in China?

Books and lots of sales materials like brochures, sell sheets, and other items that are primarily sheetfed between 5,000 and 25,000 run lengths. Books may be shorter runs.

In light of the need to educate the market on the role of print in a multichannel communications process, what do you think the Print Council and the Associations should be doing?

This is something printers should do in positioning their business. The Print Council has to embrace and use new media. Yet, their press releases are not online where they get picked up by Yahoo! News or other services (hint: PRWeb.com is inexpensive and does just that, rather than high-cost services like BusinessWire and PRNewswire). I still get press releases as MSWord documents. When I try to link to them, the releases are not up on the Print Council web site until many days later. There's even confusion about what the Print Council web site is, because there is a different organization that is reached at www.printcouncil.org where the one we want is at www.theprintcouncil.org. A good model for them would be the web site and the daily newsletter that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has. One of the most traveled sites among agency and designers involved in multichannel is the www.commarts.com, the web site for Communication Arts magazine. They should have an ad on there; their site traffic is impressive. There are incredible amounts of low-cost hi-tech hi-touch things they could be doing. But in the long run, it's what individual print businesses do with their clients on a daily basis that matters a lot more.

Do you see the decline in printing shipments continuing beyond 2006 at the same rate?

I still worry about 2007 and the increasing use of broadband. The sheer numbers of broadband users with increased speeds and lower costs and richer media offerings reach a market-changing mass sometime next year. It's not like things haven't changed already, but I see an acceleration happening soon.

As for print shipments, I keep looking for a bottom, think we found it, and then it surprises on the downside.

What do you think the target should be for printers in terms of the ratio of revenue generated by print and the revenue generated by other services?

There should be no target. Peter Drucker used to cite an example of Macy's many decades ago, trying to limit the sales of appliances to be no more than a certain percentage of its sales, and Macy’s, of course, missed a big boom in appliance sales that Sears was more than happy to take over. These ratios are arbitrary and ultimately meaningless. It's more important to know what the growing markets are and work toward building those businesses. Marketplaces change, and adhering to target ratios unnecessarily constrains choices. The only ratio that matters is profitability, and comparing yourself to industry averages there only makes one comfortable with accepting mediocre performance.

If you have questions about this webinar, please contact Eric: eric@whattheythink.com

About Eastman Kodak Company

Kodak is the world’s foremost imaging innovator, providing leading products and services to the photographic, graphic communications, and healthcare markets. With sales of $14.3 million in 2005, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on helping people better use meaningful images and information in their life and work. Consumers use Kodak’s system of digital and traditional image capture products and services to take, print, and share their pictures anytime, anywhere; Businesses effectively communicate with customers worldwide using Kodak’s solutions for prepress, conventional, and digital printing and document imaging; Creative professionals rely on Kodak’s technology to uniquely tell their story through moving or still images; and leading healthcare organizations rely on Kodak’s innovative products, services, and customized workflow solutions to help improve patient care and maximize efficiency and information sharing within and across their enterprises.

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