Inkjet Printing Ink Market Report

The inkjet ink market has continued to grow at a high rate in recent years, and it is expected to continue to maintain a good momentum of growth as digital printing continues to infiltrate the traditional offset printing and packaging printing markets. As users continue to look for the personalization and localization of product packaging and printing, inkjet printing may have become the fastest growing printing method. With the ever-increasing quality and speed of inkjet printing, new technologies still have many opportunities for development.

Many ink manufacturers have successfully entered this emerging field by launching new projects or through mergers and acquisitions.

The digital printing market drives the development of the ink industry

In the past few years, along with the expansion of the digital printing market, Fujifilm Sericol has made significant progress in the UV and solvent-based ink markets.

Through its own growth and integration, EFI's inkjet printing ink products (VUTEk and Jetrion) set sales records in 2006, a significant leap from 2005.

In the traditional printing field, inkjet printing has also developed very well. In 2006, Triangle Digital INX also achieved good growth while integrating Triangle and INX. This was mainly due to its large-format, super-large-format printing, and the traditional printing market that provided suitable products and personalization. Promotion program.

Digital printing is continuously challenging traditional screen printing and offset printing technologies, especially in the field of short-run printing and personalized on-demand printing. The economics of digital printing and the ever-improving print quality have become the two carriages that have driven the market forward. The new inkjet printers and expanded application fields have made considerable contributions to the development of inkjet printing.

Faster, higher image quality ink jet printers have injected vitality into the market. At the same time, the development of new print nozzles and the development of printing technologies have also opened up new market space for inkjet printing. SunJet, through the research and development of new ink technologies, has launched a more complete and personalized product line for emerging market segments, continues to meet customer needs, and has achieved rapid growth.

After the merger of Nazdar and Lyson in 2005, they had an extraordinary synergy advantage and had a favorable position in the fields of UV, solvent-based and water-based inks.

UV inkjet printing as a growing field, Fujifilm Sericol, Triangle Digital INX, and Hexion Specialty Chemicals have benefited a lot from it.

Hexion's UV inkjet printing segment has achieved significant strides by further developing and improving the product range introduced in 2006. Facts have proved the correctness of developing and marketing a new generation of UV inkjet inks. In the first half of 2007, considerable sales growth has been achieved and it is expected that this trend will continue in the coming years.

Relative to the entire printing industry, UV-curing printing systems are indeed growing rapidly. Hexion has caught up with this trend and launched a series of market-tested UV inks, and is continuing to research and develop to meet the needs of the new system.

With more high-speed, high-capacity, digital-platform presses such as Inca Columbia Turbo and Spyder 320, Fujifilm Sericol's Uvijet series of UV-curing inks have also grown significantly.

Nazdar partnered with Shanghai Tuck-in Development to launch the Teckwin TeckSmart UV1600/2500 series of hybrid digital presses. "Teckwin has greatly enriched our product line and has strengthened our confidence in the fast-growing market for UV-curing inks," said Mr. Gugan, vice president of sales and marketing at Nazdar.

Durst also found strong growth from the perspective of printing equipment.

Large-format UV inkjet printing units have an approximate 20% to 25% increase in the number of installations, and they are expected to create a 15% profit, while the solvent-based ink printing units will only grow by approximately 10%.

With the increase in newly-installed machines, equipment capacity and operational reliability, ink sales may grow faster, reaching 30%. Printing companies will enjoy better returns and equipment utilization will hit a new high.

New application areas drive ink industry growth

In recent years, inkjet printing technology has occupied a number of printing market segments, especially the large format printing market. Inkjet printing is also entering a more diversified market, such as labels and packaging. It can be predicted that inkjet printers will have more market space after overcoming technical and price barriers.

Now, we will find more digital web presses, which are also expanding their applications in the narrow web labeling and flexible packaging field. Nowadays, such devices are also being used on color printing machines. We will wait and see.

The speed and quality of inkjet printing technology are still improving. Fujifilm Sericol stated that continued improvements in the speed and quality of inkjet printing will prompt its entry into commercial printing and other special applications such as textile printing.

SunJet also sees the continuous development of the market and believes that the technological innovations of inkjet printheads will continue to bring inkjet printing to new markets to meet the growing demand for individual markets.

Durst saw the broad prospects of inkjet printing in sticker printing, and believes that UV-curable inks will occupy a large number of markets in the near future.

Hexion Specialty Chemicals sees that traditional processes are being improved to integrate the special features of digital printing. Inkjet printing has now entered many different markets, such as offset printing. However, in the early days, more printing companies would have a variety of flexible options: to partially modify traditional printing presses to meet the needs of digital printing, or to establish a digital production line. According to market analysis, customers are more interested in how to use UV inkjet printing technology to complete their traditional presses.

Jetrion believes that inkjet printing is well-prepared in the field of packaging and printing because many packaging and printing companies have been evaluating inkjet printing technology for many years, and some pioneers have already implemented the integration of inkjet printing units. Its packaging line, related to the categories are: labels, flexible packaging, corrugated boxes, cardboard and other all kinds of packaging and printing.

Packaging and Printing Market Large format packaging printing is equally exciting when many companies are looking for the possibility of applying inkjet printing in the commercial printing sector. At present, inkjet printing has been successfully applied to corrugated cartons, labels, and inkjet printing in varying degrees.

Fujifilm Sericol realized that the packaging and printing industry is increasingly concerned about inkjet printing and is confident that it will enter some of the traditional printing areas.

SunJet believes that the packaging and printing market is composed of a number of market segments that have different requirements for print quality, speed, format, and personalization. Only by satisfying these different needs can we reflect the unique value of inkjet printing. Smaller-volume jobs, shorter lead times, and more flexible resilience will provide the driving force for future inkjet printing applications.

Triangle Digital INX also saw the broad prospects for inkjet printing in the fields of digital labels, flexible packaging, and a large share of textiles, corrugated boxes, cardboard, and metal packaging printing.

Personalized printing market

With the large-scale application of SKU bar codes in the packaging of food, beverage, industrial, electronic, and pharmaceutical products, the market needs a variable data package printing system to manage data changes such as languages, components, barcodes, and SKU codes.

Other information such as the results of sports events printed on product packaging has been widely used by consumer goods companies. Research shows that personalized and localized packaging can significantly increase the sales of products. Any product packaging that requires a large amount of variable data to be printed, but with less print is a potential application area for inkjet printing.

At the same time, inkjet printing as a non-contact printing technology, especially suitable for packaging printing, because it needs to deal with a variety of substrates and product forms, unlike the toner-based printing technology, such as HP Indigo and Xerox Docucolor, need Direct contact with the surface of the substrate, ink-jet printing using tiny liquid ink particles, through the air jet onto the substrate, and thus showing a non-rich level and tone. Printing on bottles or cans is almost impossible for laser digital printers.

The UV-curable ink shows its unique advantages, such as better fixation and reliability. UV inks can be fixed on a wide range of substrates, such as coated or uncoated paper, film, gold foil, metal, plastic film, glass, wood, etc., and are very suitable for label and packaging printing. The different surface characteristics of the substrate can affect the image quality and can be adequately adjusted by adjusting the ink composition. At the same time, UV inks are very reliable. Unlike volatile solvent inks, they do not dry on the print head and are more conducive to equipment maintenance. They are very suitable for packaging printing that requires high equipment utilization.

UV inks can also meet customer's unique needs by changing the formula, such as spot color inks, meet recyclable, health, safety requirements, or security inks with anti-counterfeiting effects. In recent years, although there are still some costs and technical problems, due to its advantages in printing speed and environmental protection, many ink companies have started to cooperate in the research and development of new UV ink jet printing inks.

Commercial sheetfed offset market

With inkjet printing successfully entering the large-format traditional printing field, people began to look for their next breakthrough. The commercial sheetfed offset printing market is undoubtedly an attractive goal. However, the higher printing speed and quality of the sheet-fed offset printing press are still inferior to those of inkjet printing. Therefore, people urgently need new technologies to solve this bottleneck. However, inkjet printing still has the opportunity to find a suitable place in commercial printing. For example, as an assistive technology, printing personalized data or processing some short-lived jobs, it can also expand a new market for printers.

Jetrion believes that combining a traditional sheetfed offset press with digital printing technology as a composite printing method is undoubtedly an effective combination and is attractive to many printing companies. Like the narrow roll label printing industry, commercial offset printing is also a combination of the two to achieve the benefits of both fish and bears. The highly anticipated Hybrid Printing technology, which Jetrion has high hopes for, will hopefully increase the digitalization of printing companies and be used to print a variety of variable data such as barcodes, serial numbers, and variable images. The technical conditions determine that most of the variable data is only printed in monochrome, which complements offset printing. This technology enables printing companies to obtain low-cost, high-speed printing while gaining the ability to increase market demand.

At present, the fixed-matrix system is still in the experimental stage, and a lot of work must be done before large-scale application to reduce costs and increase speed.

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