I've seen a lot of Europe recently - passing through five cities across three countries in four days - courtesy of Duplo and Heidelberg. But being abroad brought with it a home truth - many of the printers we visited across Italy and France were selling into the UK. It put me in mind of a recent presentation given by Ben Verwaayen, BT's CEO, at a recent Oce event where he questioned where markets and competitors started and ended. His example was of talking to the boss of Nestle and the revelation that its biggest competitor was the mobile phone - kids were spending their money on mobile gaming rather than KitKats.
We visited Pixart in Venice, a company that would struggle to live up to the moniker "printer" as many might understand it. This guy - Matteo Rigamonti - is a new breed. He is a completely digital web-to-print operation. He turns around 2,000 orders a day, all of which come from online, directory, email and fax marketing. There are no sales people. He has no relationship with customers, and also no loyalty to brands. Functionality is everything.
"I have to know how it works," he said. And with digital, it means he knows exactly how every sheet will look. He's not interested in litho. "I push the button 'print' and the printer prints. This is the right way to print."
He runs HP Indigos, but he's not an HP shop in the sense that he would be tolerant of any lapses from the company. Large format prints are done on Mimaki machines, but he said he will move to Roland as a part he needed took six weeks to arrive. His finishing line is increasingly moving to Duplo with two 645 machines and a new finishing line replacing Horizon kit - again because of a bad support experience.
But again, he doesn't have any loyalty to Duplo - it's the automation and ease of use he's after. He doesn't want to have to train anyone on a particular machine, or have them minding it. For Rigamonti, his staff should be able to operate any and all of his kit, and that's what Duplo offers.
Why should you care about this £20m operation in Italy? Because more than half of the work he churns through comes from overseas, notably the UK, he said.