A long time contributor to New Zealand Printer and Australian Printer magazines, Tribute established his own consultancy company to the printing industry in 1984 and worked with leading print authority Seybold as its international editor until 2000.

Tribute’s address on new technology and what it means for print was a 45 minute ride through everything to do with print.

Although the presentation started with the news that growth in print worldwide has dropped below that of the economy as a whole, there was room for hope for companies prepared to adopt an innovative approach, Tribute said.

The drop in growth was a structural change, which could be traced to the beginning of the internet boom, which had taken pages away from printers. Today, some 45 billion PDF pages are transmitted over the internet annually, according to Tribute.

Tribute says the key for printers to maintain their growth in the face of this challenge is to aim to provide added value services and to take advantage of the‘lights out factory’, or computer integrated manufacturing (CIM).

He says that for every dollar spent on print, another $6 were spent elsewhere in the print value chain, anywhere from content to fulfilment, representing a huge market that the traditional ‘printer’ is not tapping into.

“Your visiting card should read ‘digital services company’ rather than ‘printer’,” Tribute says.

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