The Industry Measure Releases New Studies

The Industry Measure (formerly TrendWatch Graphic Arts) has released a number of new surveys and studies. 

According to its fall 2006 printing survey, The Industry Measure Business Optimism Index for print and prepress firms rose slightly from 86.94 last spring to 87.48 this fall.

The Business Optimism Index is based on the responses to the “How do you expect business conditions in the next 12 months to be?” question in its printing surveys, and is indexed back to the first Printing survey in 1995. Optimism peaked in the mid-1990s along with business conditions in general, and plummeted during the economic slowdown of the early 2000s. Optimism rose again in late 2003 and 2004, but dropped again in 2006.

How optimistic firms are is generally a good predictor of the extent to which companies will be making extensive capital investment.

At the same time, The Industry Measure found that 37 percent of print and prepress establishments cited “improving economic conditions” as a sales opportunity, the lowest this opportunity has been since 2001.

These findings can be found in The Industry Measure’s Special Report, “Printing Forecast 2007: The Industry Measure Perspective on the Challenges and Opportunities for the Printing Industry in the Next 12 Months and Beyond.” As noted by Industry Measure, “improving economic conditions” implies that doing nothing and waiting for things to get better is a strategy of some kind, the old “rising tide lifts all boats” approach, and noted that more proactive opportunities like expanding digital printing services, adding creative and design services, even using the Internet more effectively, have been taking precedence.

On-demand books are also a hot topic for printers. According to The Industry Measure’s new report “Digital Printing 2006: Printers,”20 percent of book publishers cited “production for on-demand books” as a business challenge, while 13 percent cited “competition from print-on-demand publishers” as a business challenge.

According to the study, for years, one of the top applications for on-demand digital printing has been books. While there is scant competition from small or self-publishers, incorporating on-demand printing into the production workflow is not without its appeal. Printing certain titles (backlist or non-blockbuster new titles) as needed to reduce warehousing can provide significant cost and logistical savings, while publishers say that this is not without its challenges.

E-books are one such area of interest In “The Multichannel Mix: The Role of Print, Web, Wireless, and Other Platforms in Today’s New Media Environment-Part I: Publishing,” the Industry Measure examines the market for e-books, noting that from summer 2003 to summer 2006,e-book production as a sales opportunity for book publishers rose from 10 percent to 24 percent. In early October, Sony announced that it was at long last starting to ship its new Sony Reader, one of the first commercially available implementations of “electronic paper,” or a reflective electronic display that has the viewing characteristics of pulp-based paper. Some industry experts feel that the Sony Reader will do for e-books what the iPod did for MP3s, while others are decidedly more skeptical.

The Industry Measure has also released the industry’s first baseline study on Variable Data Print (VDP) / Variable Imaging (VI) pricing practices.This Industry Measure mini-report, “Pricing for Variable Data Print: Baseline Data on What the Industry Is Doing Now,” is aimed at printers and other VDP producers. Data cited in the report includes:
•Percentage of respondents offering VDP in-house or outsourcing it;
•Preferred pricing models (such as all-in-one package price or individual line-item invoicing);
•Which services VDP producers are itemizing separately;
•Whether respondents are pricing individual services by value or cost-plus;
•Top challenges faced in pricing VDP jobs.

One of the most interesting findings of the survey is that the most common pricing models are polar opposites—all-in-one package pricing and individual line-item invoicing—with nearly equal percentages of respondents citing each pricing model. This reflects not just VDP producers’ differing pricing philosophies, but their differing business philosophies.

For more information, visit The Industry Measure’s web site at www.theindustrymeasure.com.