You’ll never guess where I was last week. I bet you. Go on, name your price.
Drupa.
That’s not entirely true. For one, I was in Hamburg, not the fair Fair city of Düsseldorf. For two, Drupa is but a fading memory. Instead, I was sent to our trade journalist cousins at Druck&Medien magazine to complete a review issue of the Drupa Report Daily, the exhibition newsletter we produced at the Messe in June.
So, no, I wasn’t actually at Drupa. Probably lucky we didn’t bet.
When I cast my mind back to those 14 days last summer in Germany, they are rose-tinted days of yesteryear, a time when the global print market seemed to almost be a positive place, held aloft by dreams of automation, by colour managed flights of fantasy, by launches, investments, of green ventures, of partnerships, alliances, of expansions. It was a fortnight capped by a seemingly never-ending string of zeroes attached to the sales figures of show exhibitors.
How times have changed, eh.
The dire state of the market – both for printers and printing equipment manufacturers – really hit home for me last week when I was reading (recent) quotes in that Drupa Report Daily review issue. In it, exhibitors boast about record Drupa sales figures and glorious futures. I flick to printweek.com and the stories are of those same manufacturers sliding into the red. KBA’s reason? "A sizeable volume of contracts negotiated at Drupa" failing to go through.
You can’t really blame those press customers for defaulting. I hear Iceland’s bid for a €4 billion loan was rejected by both the US and EU – if a whole nation once famed for the strong balance sheet of its finance sector can’t even get a loan, then there can be little hope for a print firm.
So – surprise surprise – suppliers exaggerate the positive spin of their economic situation: it’s not like they’re going to admit the sky is falling.
But don’t printers do the same? Who actually tells their customers that below-cost prices are killing them, not to mention the industry? At the recent Stationer’s Debate on print management, someone urged printers to tell their customers just how much pain low prices were causing. To show a buyer your margins. To explain that quality print costs money and buyers should pay more for it.
Tell that to Wyndeham and Southernprint.
But as Jo Francis pointed out in her recent blog, even Polestar, which has been blamed before for forcing market prices down by selling print at a loss, faced the same exact problem, complaining of being undercut 30% on a magazine job. If only Jo’s (tongue-in-cheek) idea of an OPEC-style body for web offset printers could come to fruition. Australian box-making behemoths Visy and Amcor certainly thought it a good idea and through the mid-90s would hold secret meeting in backstreet Melbourne bars to fix prices for cartons. They were eventually busted and Visy CEO Richard Pratt was slammed with an AU$36m fine, the single biggest personal fine in Oz history. Up in this hemisphere, the courts have raged with multi-million pound fines for paper price cartels involving the likes of Arjowiggins, Stora Enso and Metsäliitto.
Most UK printers would struggle with the logistics of organising a secret price cartel (although no doubt they’d agree the Aussies had the right idea by meeting at the local pub). But perhaps there’s some happy medium between an illegal, anti-competitive cartel and an association to promote sustainable economics in print, some rose-tinted future, where printers are held aloft by dreams of fair prices and the flights of fantasy of reasonable cost structures.