David Savastano, Editor01.24.23
The inkjet printing market continues to be the fastest growth area in printing, with advancements being made in numerous markets. Two of the fastest growing fields are the digital packaging and textile segments, which will be the focus on their own reports in Ink World’s July and October 2023 issues, respectively. There is also plenty of growth in a wide range of markets, including wide format and industrial inkjet printing.
Nikhil Pampatwar, head - research & intelligence with Verified Market Research (VMR), predicts the digital printing market will grow at a CAGR of 6% from 2023-2030. The market size in 2021 was $8,550 million and is projected to reach $13,651 million by 2030.
“Experts predict that digital printing will continue to move from commercial printing to publishing and packaging, becoming faster and designed to handle more types of printing in the future,” Pampatwar noted. “The market for digital printing is expanding at an increasingly rapid rate, and both the equipment and the colors are continually enhancing their capabilities and environmental profiles.”
Digital ink manufacturers report that they are seeing growth in sales.
Mark Goodearl, senior ink product manager for EFI, said that the inkjet market is currently witnessing two growth patterns – recovery growth and growth tied to newer industrial applications.
“The former group reflects digital printing, particularly in the display graphics market for EFI, returning to pre-pandemic levels and then progressing into more incremental growth that we envisioned happening without all the drastic changes that happened in 2019-2021,” Goodearl said. “Accommodating this growth in ink manufacturing means we have to focus on streamlining, accelerating manufacturing while ensuring our supply chains stay strong.”
Goodearl noted that some ink lines, such as aqueous dye-sub inks for soft signage printing, declined early in the pandemic, as those inks are used for a many different types of event graphics – sporting events, tradeshows, conferences and other large gatherings that temporarily went away.
“But those events are not coming back gradually – people are eager to travel and be out and about, so we’ve been able to scale production back up to manufacture to pre-pandemic levels pretty quickly,” Goodearl added. “Aqueous dye-sublimation inks saw the largest swing between a decline in 2019 to accelerated demand by late 2022, but many of our UV LED inkjet ink products also saw similar trends, with an uptick in demand that should continue through the year.”
Phil Jackman, global product manager, Digital, Sun Chemical, also pointed to the pandemic’s effect on the soft-signage market.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen continued growth in coding and marking, textiles and various print applications for packaging and labels,” said Jackman. “While the pandemic hampered growth for wide and super-wide formats in the graphics market, which diminished demand for signage at industry events and caused many print shops to diversify their businesses, we are starting to see a gradual resurgence in this market.”
Randy Vandagriff, SVP, Digital Print, Eastman Kodak Company, said that inkjet technology is seeing the largest growth among all print segments in today’s markets.
“While the majority of what is printed worldwide is not done digitally, there are technological advancements making digital print quality equal to that of offset and more economical for small and medium runs,” Vandagriff added.
Rich Rindo, VP of sales and marketing for FUJIFILM, said that overall, he is seeing very strong growth in the world of digital printing.
“In the commercial segment, digital is not only replacing analog printing processes but also making earlier digital solutions obsolete,” Rindo said. “Significant growth is continuing in the label, books, and transactional segments. New areas of growth include flexible packaging, corrugated and folding carton, with textiles being the latest growth area. Sign and display has been a growth area but has leveled off in comparison to the other segments.”
Jay Larsen, GM and director of R&D for INX International’s digital hardware division, reported that steady, strong growth continues to occur in the digital printing market.
“Digital technology is maturing, and adoption continues into new areas beyond the traditional flat print market,” Larsen continued. “This includes markets such as textiles, direct-to-product, direct-to-package and other specialty applications. Additional growth is taking place due to the increased targeting and personalization of printed materials, as well as products like drinkware, garments and more.”
Josh Boivin, inkjet sales for Wikoff Color Corporation, reported that as technology in digital printing improves, it is able to penetrate additional markets.
“This has caused a lot of growth in digital printing over the last few years,” added Boivin.
“Despite some challenges faced last year due to the pandemic and recently with inventory balancing, we continued to see digital printing growing,” Gabriela Kim, global marketing manager, DuPont Artistri Digital Inks, said. “As economies slowly recover from those scenarios, digital printing will resume its growth at the high level we saw before.”
“In our building materials segment, the ceramic tile space has largely converted to digital, although there will be a shift in demand as tile manufacturers switch from solvent-based inks to aqueous inks, something EFI has enabled with an EFI Cretaprint Hybrid printer model,” Goodearl observed.
Display graphics is another area where digital printing is now dominant.
“Certainly, the display graphics market is maturing, with digital printers taking volume from offset and screen printing as production volume capabilities with digital drive down costs for customers,” Goodearl pointed out. “Our Super High Speed category of display graphics printers, including a new VUTEk XT hybrid flatbed/roll-to-roll printer that prints in excess of 350 boards per hour, will do a great job at addressing driving even greater digital conversion.”
“The most mature digital print markets are ceramic tile printing and sign and graphics, where they are mostly converted to digital printing wherever possible, but labels are growing rapidly,” said Jackman. “More digital presses have been sold into labels in the past five years or so than analog, but there are many analog presses still running. There will be considerable percentage growth in most markets including narrow web and packaging even though the total market penetration is currently low.”
Larsen noted that INX’s traditional markets are still very much in the adoption phase for digital printing.
“Labels, beverage cans, drinkware and direct-to-product or packaging are all adopting digital where it makes sense, yet still utilizing the traditional printing methods,” said Larsen. “There are a number of processes that combine the best of both worlds to create a better finished product. An example would be printing white traditionally for textile or glassware application, followed by digital for the artwork.”
“Analog printing will have its place in most markets, but where there are short runs, digital is able to take over a larger portion of the business,” Boivin observed. “Promotional printing and graphic printing have seen a large portion of the business taken over by digital printing. Digital printing is becoming more common place in labels as well.”
“In the signage market and wide-format areas of the outdoor advertising market, production has already been converted to digital printing with wide and large format printing systems on a very large scale,” Vandagriff observed. “Digital printing is also gaining an increasing share of label production. In label printing, however, digital printing is often combined with analog processes such as flexo, offset, letterpress and screen printing to meet specific customer and cost requirements by leveraging specific capabilities and benefits of the different printing processes.”
“Aqueous dye-sublimination inks, such as those used for soft signage graphics production, and pigment-based inks for industrial textile production are amongst the fastest growing right now for EFI,” Goodearl said.
“Packaging is seeing some of the largest growth in digital printing,” said Boivin. “As short runs become more prevalent and water-based technologies become more sophisticated digital printing will take over more market share in this space.”
“The market is growing for specialty variable data labels, which includes durable outdoor serialized products as well as security applications,” Larsen said. “The cylindrical printing market is growing steadily with a push into the beverage can market.”
“We are currently seeing the most growth in the commercial print segment, photo labs and most major packaging segments such as labels and flexible packaging,” Rindo noted. “Textiles is the latest segment to begin experiencing substantial growth.”
Vandagriff noted that the packaging market is seeing significant growth as more companies want and need smaller print runs, more versioning, and the inclusion of variable data, adding that less than 2% of packaging, according to IT Strategies, is printed digitally.“The largest growth segment is corrugated, based on the consumer demand and behavioral changes from COVID,” said Vandagriff. “Folding cartons, flexible packaging, and labels make up other areas of growth in packaging.”
“Ink and printhead technologies will drive yields up, a trend we have witnessed for the past few years, and that strengthens the economic reasons for our customers to go digital over analog,” Goodearl said. “It is fair to say that EFI will continue to develop solutions for faster speeds, including automated material handling solutions that increase overall throughput. And, based on investments we have made in our ink plants, we will have greater manufacturing capacity to meet growing demand and to bring new ink innovations to market.”
“Most digital applications are expected to grow, the rate of which will depend on their maturity in their product lifecycle,” Jackman said. “Labels, narrow web and packaging (sheetfed cartons/corrugated and flexible packaging) are all expected to experience double-digit annual growth in the next five years.”
Boivin believes that some market adoption will start to level out like what has happened in the graphics market, but for the most part, digital printing will continue to grow overall.
“With improvements in technology we will see markets like food packaging, flexible packaging, medical packaging, labels, and corrugated, for example, continuing to grow,” Boivin added.
“Printers, whether in packaging or textile, continue to invest in this technology, and volumes printed digitally have been increasing at a high rate year over year,” Kim noted.
“We expect evolutionary progress on all fronts,” Larsen said. “Every new project to digitally print on something that has never been digitally decorated creates opportunities for advancements of digital printing into new areas, and the development of new techniques, inks, treatments and technologies. The expectation is that printheads will continue to evolve in speed, viscosity ranges, reliability and quality.”
“We expect there will be continued high growth of digital printing over a wide range of segments during the next five years,” Rindo said. “Our job at Fujifilm is to continue to develop solutions not only for where the market is today but equally important, where the market is going and will be tomorrow.”
Ultimately, Kodak’s Vandagriff sees a bright future for digital printing.
“Digital printing will continue to take over market share from offset,” said Vandagriff. “As quality matches offset, presses like the ULTRA 520 Press can complement offset processes and production. There are still some obstacles to overcome in digital printing for flexible packaging, such as compatibility with overprint varnish. Digital printing will continue to improve across the board – wider applications, even better quality, and more traditional print markets.”
Nikhil Pampatwar, head - research & intelligence with Verified Market Research (VMR), predicts the digital printing market will grow at a CAGR of 6% from 2023-2030. The market size in 2021 was $8,550 million and is projected to reach $13,651 million by 2030.
“Experts predict that digital printing will continue to move from commercial printing to publishing and packaging, becoming faster and designed to handle more types of printing in the future,” Pampatwar noted. “The market for digital printing is expanding at an increasingly rapid rate, and both the equipment and the colors are continually enhancing their capabilities and environmental profiles.”
Digital ink manufacturers report that they are seeing growth in sales.
Mark Goodearl, senior ink product manager for EFI, said that the inkjet market is currently witnessing two growth patterns – recovery growth and growth tied to newer industrial applications.
“The former group reflects digital printing, particularly in the display graphics market for EFI, returning to pre-pandemic levels and then progressing into more incremental growth that we envisioned happening without all the drastic changes that happened in 2019-2021,” Goodearl said. “Accommodating this growth in ink manufacturing means we have to focus on streamlining, accelerating manufacturing while ensuring our supply chains stay strong.”
Goodearl noted that some ink lines, such as aqueous dye-sub inks for soft signage printing, declined early in the pandemic, as those inks are used for a many different types of event graphics – sporting events, tradeshows, conferences and other large gatherings that temporarily went away.
“But those events are not coming back gradually – people are eager to travel and be out and about, so we’ve been able to scale production back up to manufacture to pre-pandemic levels pretty quickly,” Goodearl added. “Aqueous dye-sublimation inks saw the largest swing between a decline in 2019 to accelerated demand by late 2022, but many of our UV LED inkjet ink products also saw similar trends, with an uptick in demand that should continue through the year.”
Phil Jackman, global product manager, Digital, Sun Chemical, also pointed to the pandemic’s effect on the soft-signage market.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen continued growth in coding and marking, textiles and various print applications for packaging and labels,” said Jackman. “While the pandemic hampered growth for wide and super-wide formats in the graphics market, which diminished demand for signage at industry events and caused many print shops to diversify their businesses, we are starting to see a gradual resurgence in this market.”
Randy Vandagriff, SVP, Digital Print, Eastman Kodak Company, said that inkjet technology is seeing the largest growth among all print segments in today’s markets.
“While the majority of what is printed worldwide is not done digitally, there are technological advancements making digital print quality equal to that of offset and more economical for small and medium runs,” Vandagriff added.
Rich Rindo, VP of sales and marketing for FUJIFILM, said that overall, he is seeing very strong growth in the world of digital printing.
“In the commercial segment, digital is not only replacing analog printing processes but also making earlier digital solutions obsolete,” Rindo said. “Significant growth is continuing in the label, books, and transactional segments. New areas of growth include flexible packaging, corrugated and folding carton, with textiles being the latest growth area. Sign and display has been a growth area but has leveled off in comparison to the other segments.”
Jay Larsen, GM and director of R&D for INX International’s digital hardware division, reported that steady, strong growth continues to occur in the digital printing market.
“Digital technology is maturing, and adoption continues into new areas beyond the traditional flat print market,” Larsen continued. “This includes markets such as textiles, direct-to-product, direct-to-package and other specialty applications. Additional growth is taking place due to the increased targeting and personalization of printed materials, as well as products like drinkware, garments and more.”
Josh Boivin, inkjet sales for Wikoff Color Corporation, reported that as technology in digital printing improves, it is able to penetrate additional markets.
“This has caused a lot of growth in digital printing over the last few years,” added Boivin.
“Despite some challenges faced last year due to the pandemic and recently with inventory balancing, we continued to see digital printing growing,” Gabriela Kim, global marketing manager, DuPont Artistri Digital Inks, said. “As economies slowly recover from those scenarios, digital printing will resume its growth at the high level we saw before.”
Key Markets for Inkjet
There have been quite a few markets that have shifted over to digital printing. Ceramic tile printing is one such segment.“In our building materials segment, the ceramic tile space has largely converted to digital, although there will be a shift in demand as tile manufacturers switch from solvent-based inks to aqueous inks, something EFI has enabled with an EFI Cretaprint Hybrid printer model,” Goodearl observed.
Display graphics is another area where digital printing is now dominant.
“Certainly, the display graphics market is maturing, with digital printers taking volume from offset and screen printing as production volume capabilities with digital drive down costs for customers,” Goodearl pointed out. “Our Super High Speed category of display graphics printers, including a new VUTEk XT hybrid flatbed/roll-to-roll printer that prints in excess of 350 boards per hour, will do a great job at addressing driving even greater digital conversion.”
“The most mature digital print markets are ceramic tile printing and sign and graphics, where they are mostly converted to digital printing wherever possible, but labels are growing rapidly,” said Jackman. “More digital presses have been sold into labels in the past five years or so than analog, but there are many analog presses still running. There will be considerable percentage growth in most markets including narrow web and packaging even though the total market penetration is currently low.”
Larsen noted that INX’s traditional markets are still very much in the adoption phase for digital printing.
“Labels, beverage cans, drinkware and direct-to-product or packaging are all adopting digital where it makes sense, yet still utilizing the traditional printing methods,” said Larsen. “There are a number of processes that combine the best of both worlds to create a better finished product. An example would be printing white traditionally for textile or glassware application, followed by digital for the artwork.”
“Analog printing will have its place in most markets, but where there are short runs, digital is able to take over a larger portion of the business,” Boivin observed. “Promotional printing and graphic printing have seen a large portion of the business taken over by digital printing. Digital printing is becoming more common place in labels as well.”
“In the signage market and wide-format areas of the outdoor advertising market, production has already been converted to digital printing with wide and large format printing systems on a very large scale,” Vandagriff observed. “Digital printing is also gaining an increasing share of label production. In label printing, however, digital printing is often combined with analog processes such as flexo, offset, letterpress and screen printing to meet specific customer and cost requirements by leveraging specific capabilities and benefits of the different printing processes.”
Fastest-Growing Areas for Digital
There is a wide variety of markets where digital printing is making significant advances.“Aqueous dye-sublimination inks, such as those used for soft signage graphics production, and pigment-based inks for industrial textile production are amongst the fastest growing right now for EFI,” Goodearl said.
“Packaging is seeing some of the largest growth in digital printing,” said Boivin. “As short runs become more prevalent and water-based technologies become more sophisticated digital printing will take over more market share in this space.”
“The market is growing for specialty variable data labels, which includes durable outdoor serialized products as well as security applications,” Larsen said. “The cylindrical printing market is growing steadily with a push into the beverage can market.”
“We are currently seeing the most growth in the commercial print segment, photo labs and most major packaging segments such as labels and flexible packaging,” Rindo noted. “Textiles is the latest segment to begin experiencing substantial growth.”
Vandagriff noted that the packaging market is seeing significant growth as more companies want and need smaller print runs, more versioning, and the inclusion of variable data, adding that less than 2% of packaging, according to IT Strategies, is printed digitally.“The largest growth segment is corrugated, based on the consumer demand and behavioral changes from COVID,” said Vandagriff. “Folding cartons, flexible packaging, and labels make up other areas of growth in packaging.”
Expectations for the Coming Years
Inkjet ink manufacturers see lots of opportunities ahead for digital printing, with labels and packaging among key growth areas.“Ink and printhead technologies will drive yields up, a trend we have witnessed for the past few years, and that strengthens the economic reasons for our customers to go digital over analog,” Goodearl said. “It is fair to say that EFI will continue to develop solutions for faster speeds, including automated material handling solutions that increase overall throughput. And, based on investments we have made in our ink plants, we will have greater manufacturing capacity to meet growing demand and to bring new ink innovations to market.”
“Most digital applications are expected to grow, the rate of which will depend on their maturity in their product lifecycle,” Jackman said. “Labels, narrow web and packaging (sheetfed cartons/corrugated and flexible packaging) are all expected to experience double-digit annual growth in the next five years.”
Boivin believes that some market adoption will start to level out like what has happened in the graphics market, but for the most part, digital printing will continue to grow overall.
“With improvements in technology we will see markets like food packaging, flexible packaging, medical packaging, labels, and corrugated, for example, continuing to grow,” Boivin added.
“Printers, whether in packaging or textile, continue to invest in this technology, and volumes printed digitally have been increasing at a high rate year over year,” Kim noted.
“We expect evolutionary progress on all fronts,” Larsen said. “Every new project to digitally print on something that has never been digitally decorated creates opportunities for advancements of digital printing into new areas, and the development of new techniques, inks, treatments and technologies. The expectation is that printheads will continue to evolve in speed, viscosity ranges, reliability and quality.”
“We expect there will be continued high growth of digital printing over a wide range of segments during the next five years,” Rindo said. “Our job at Fujifilm is to continue to develop solutions not only for where the market is today but equally important, where the market is going and will be tomorrow.”
Ultimately, Kodak’s Vandagriff sees a bright future for digital printing.
“Digital printing will continue to take over market share from offset,” said Vandagriff. “As quality matches offset, presses like the ULTRA 520 Press can complement offset processes and production. There are still some obstacles to overcome in digital printing for flexible packaging, such as compatibility with overprint varnish. Digital printing will continue to improve across the board – wider applications, even better quality, and more traditional print markets.”
