The world’s biggest trade show drupa says printers visiting the event in three months’ time will come face to face with the industry’s future.
The organisers of the giant event ramped up its pre-show expectations today at the beginning of a three day presentation to 100 trade press editors from around the world, writes Wayne Robinson from Dusseldorf.
Print 4.0 will be the major topic, which drupa defines as complete digitisation of the print production process. Speaking at the media event drupa president KBA managing director Claus Bolza-Schuneman says, “Full digital workflow, whether that involves a digital press or an offset or flexo press, is essential to profitable business.”
Digital printing itself will be a key theme of drupa 2016, which is expected to have a host of new digital printing systems on show, both inkjet and toner, sheetfed and webfed, with all the heavyweight players launching new digital presses. According to drupa, digital printing is growing at 7.5 per cent annually.
[Related: drupa event information]
The cloud will also feature heavily with two of the three companies presenting on day one. Kodak and HP Inc are both promoting their new cloud services, in Kodak’s case it is transitioning Prinergy workflow to the cloud, while HP Inc is launching PrintOS, a cloud based business operating system.
Under the motto ‘touch the future,’ drupa says it is placing the industry’s innovative power centre stage and providing a platform for future technologies. The focus is especially on next-generation and highlight themes include print, packaging production, multichannel, 3D printing, functional printing and green printing.
This year’s drupa takes place against the backdrop of a shrinking number of printers, and print industry that is undergoing profound structural change, with traditional print plateauing or declining in the key western markets. The drupa organisers say the show will address these issues head on, and visitors will see where opportunity is arising.
Claus Bolza-Schuneman says, “Our job at drupa is to transfer trends into products that printers can use to successfully service the market.”
The 2016 drupa will be a shortened version of 11 days, but all halls are sold out, with 1650 exhibitors signed up. It runs May 31 to June 10. According to drupa, because it has broadened the base visitor numbers may not suffer the way they have at other trade shows.
Over the next three days, editors will have presentations from a host of leading exhibitors, although tellingly, no offset press manufacturers. However, they will all be at the show.
The three day event kicked off with the launch of this year’s drupa song, which in line with the 1970s revival sweeping the world is a disco based up-tempo sure-fire hit.
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