Delivering the more-than-upbeat assessment Alon Bar Shany, HP’s vice president for Indigo, pointed his audience to the fact that in 2000 there were just one billion pages a year printed digital, and said the trend for tenfold increase in eight years would continue.

In an even more bullish prediction Bar-Shany also predicted capex on digital printing would overtake offset by 2011, and predicted that just a year later digital would overtake offset in its value to printers.

Chris Morgan, vice president for imaging and graphic arts told journalists in a private briefing that the current global economic crisis was hastening the transition from analogue (ed: offset, flexo) to digital printing, and that once marketeers had become familiar with the benefits of digital they would never go back.

HP had invited some 700 printers and two dozen journalists from across the Asia Pacific and Japan to Beijing on the eve of China Print to an InfoTrends produced seminar. The assembled guests heard InfoTrends consultants tell them to develop their businesses to include variable data printing services, on demand printing, web to print and multi channel marketing. They also heard a succession of Indigo users from around the world share their experiences.

China is a key market for HP Indigo, which currently has an installed base of 200 of its machines there, just more than double the number in Australia, but China has an estimated 100,000 printers, compared to 5000 in Australia

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