Print Action: Symposium and a Press at RIT

Some of graphic arts' most powerful people came to the Rochester Institute of Technology last month to help dedicate one of 45 gapless Sunday 2000 web press systems currently operating around the world. Reported to be worth anywhere from US$7- to US$10-million, Heidelberg consigned the new press to RIT, which built an 11,000-square-foot facility to house it. Bruce James, U.S. Public Printer and chair of RIT's Board of Trustees, told the crowd, "the Sunday 2000 represents over 500 years of accumulated technology in one place."

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The event rounded out a month of educational commitment from the company. Just weeks earlier Heidelberg had its name permanently fixed to Ryerson University's new Graphic Communications Management building in down-town Toronto. The Toronto grand opening of Ryerson's GCM building drew a similarly powerful crowd, but the crowd in Rochester also came a little earlier to take in an RIT-sponsored symposium.

Frank Romano, RIT Fawcett Professor, provided a status report on printing industry demographics, in which he identified five major trends driving the industry: printing process roulette, industry consolidation, more effective technology, electronic challengers and a new workforce. The school and its students generated many of the results in the finding.

When speaking about printing process roulette, Romano highlighted a busy diagram adorned with litho, flexo, gravure and digital graphical pies. Each pie showed arrows, representing applications, leading into or away from other process pies. The diagram itself showed the continued diversity in which jobs are being output. The diagram highlighted the fact that the printing industry is growing in complexity to accommodate the client's changing demands, which are driving printers into hybrid operations to continue increasing their sales levels.

While speaking about consolidation in the industry, Romano focused on a chart that outlined a serious shift in demographics for the U.S. printing industry. Perhaps the most striking finding from Romano and the RIT team predicted that from the 30,000 small-sized printing firms that existed in the year 2000 only 20,000 of them will be around by the year 2010 and only 11,000 by 2020. The chart also suggested that of the 8,500 medium-sized firms in 2000 only 5,000 will remain by 2010, while there will be 600 large printing firms in 2020, down slightly from the 700 level predicted to be around in 2010.

For the whole of the U.S. printing industry, the 39,300 firms that existed in the year 2000 will shrink by more than half to 17,100 firms by 2020. In line with that decline, Romano highlighted that there will only be 600,000 people employed in the industry by the year 2020. This number is down significantly from the 1.4-million people reported to be in the industry in the year 2000. Interestingly, Romano reported that revenue per employee would rise to US$200,000 by the year 2020, up significantly from the US$108,571 per employee mark of the year 2000. Romano suggested that printing industry revenues would drop US$120 billion by the year 2020 from the US$152 billion mark in 2000.

Romano then addressed the issue of equipment over capacity in the market, suggesting that there will be a large shift toward fewer and more effective printing presses. This trend has already been under way for the past decade, which saw tens of thousands of presses disappearing from the U.S. marketplace. Romano challenged the crowd to consider what constitutes a commercial printer, by bringing up the changing focus with in-plant departments, premedia services, copy shops, newspaper printers, packaging firms and specialty printers.

Romano closed his discussion by saying that the paperless office is in fact getting closer, because of the internet and e-commerce. He also signalled the growing strength of e-reading technology, that such systems are taking on a new and powerful evolution. Much of this emergence is changing the workforce coming into the industry, which is cross-media oriented.

Clearly the intention of Heidelberg is to assist in keeping the youth, which over the next decade will replace an aging print industry, oriented with the tradition of graphic arts business. The two new laboratories at Ryerson and RIT and the equipment in them, sponsored by many other companies, will go along way in keeping youth on press.

This point was driven home when the Sunday press' 45,000-pound splicer and 67,000-pound drier showed up at the campus last July. After the printing units and folder arrived in October, Heidelberg began installation, and by January of this year the press took over much of the 11,000-square-foot facility.