HP to ramp up digital printing offering

TEL AVIV, ISREAL: Personal computer and printer maker Hewlett Packard said it was moving forward with a plan to ramp up digital printing offerings as part of a trend towards a reduction in analogue printing.

Fresh off a number of key acquisitions, HP launched a series of graphic arts products and technologies to enhance digital printing, saying it aims to be "the global leader in digital graphic arts".

"We are going to lead the (transformation) of moving from analogue to digital," Yariv Avisar, vice president and general manager of large format printing industrial solutions for HP's Imaging and Printing Group, told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Tel Aviv.

"This conversion is ... our main strategy," he said. "All these acquisitions and products and activities that we are doing is mainly to accelerate this conversion."

In its most recent acquisition, HP last week completed its $118.4 million purchase of Israel's NUR Macroprinters, a maker of industrial wide-format digital inkjet printers.

While only about 9 percent of all pages in the world are printed digitally, digital pages are growing at a much faster rate than analogue ones, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of Graphics and Imaging Business at HP.

"We're on the cusp with a lot of the sort of innovation coming from HP and others in the industry so that you'll see an acceleration of the shift from analog to digital," he said. "That shift mostly will happen in the graphics base."

HP officials estimated that about 25 percent of the global signage market is done by digital printers.

ACQUISITIONS

Among HPs new offerings are a high-speed 30-inch inkjet platform for high-volume production of books, newspapers and direct marketing materials, new latex printing technologies and an expanded portfolio of HP Indigo presses.

Along with NUR, HP has made two other key acquisitions in the graphic arts field in the last 2-1/2 years: Israeli printer maker Scitex Vision and MacDermid Colorspan, a U.S. manufacturer of wide format inkjet printers.

HP suggested that it was unlikely to make any more purchases in the near-term.

"Now it's time to digest the acquisitions, leverage them, integrate them into HP systems and to make sure we are executing our plans rather than to look for more and more acquisitions," Avisar said. "I believe that if there are opportunities in the future, HP will be on top of them as well."

Adding NUR to the HP Scitex portfolio allows the company to offer a broader portfolio on the industrial side that can fit any budget and any need of print service providers, Avisar said.

HP officials said it considered Israel important for its growth strategy, he noted. The company is the second-largest foreign employer in Israel's IT field and has the second-largest research and development centre in the country after Intel

It also acquired Mercury Interactive Corp. for $4.5 billion in 2006. In addition to factories in the central city of Ness Ziona and the southern town of Kiryat Gat, HP opened a $4.1 million factory on Monday to manufacture large-format printers in the northern city of Ceasarea.