The Structural Decline That Is Forcing Reinvention
The traditional printing and imaging industry — built around the office document printing market that laser printers, copiers, and multifunction devices served for four decades — is managing a structural revenue decline whose trajectory is well-established and whose drivers are not cyclical. The paperless office has arrived through the cumulative effect of email displacing physical correspondence, cloud-based document management eliminating the need for physical filing copies, video conferencing reducing the printed presentation materials that business meetings historically required, and the mobile work patterns of the post-pandemic era reducing the time workers spend in office environments where printing infrastructure is available. Office print volumes have declined in most major markets consistently since the mid-2010s and accelerated sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic when office occupancy dropped dramatically. The decline has moderated but not reversed as office occupancy has partially recovered — the structural reduction in paper-based office workflows represents a permanent demand destruction whose reversal would require the re-adoption of paper-based information management that digital tools have made obsolete.
The printing and imaging industry's response to office print volume decline has been a deliberate pivot toward growth segments not subject to the digitalisation pressure that has eroded office document printing. The growth segments — industrial printing, packaging printing, label printing, textile printing, and three-dimensional printing — share the characteristic of addressing physical production requirements that cannot be digitised, and whose demand is correlated with industrial production, consumer goods consumption, and logistics activity rather than with the information management workflows that digital technology has progressively displaced from paper. The reinvention of the printing and imaging market around these industrial and commercial printing applications is well underway and is producing genuine revenue growth in the segments that are scaling, but the scale of the declining office print market relative to the growing industrial print segments means that the aggregate printing market is still in revenue transition.
Packaging Printing: The Volume Growth Driver
The packaging printing market — encompassing the printing of flexible packaging, folding carton, corrugated board, labels, and the decorative and functional printing that constitutes the brand identity and regulatory compliance content of consumer goods packaging — is the largest and most commercially significant growth segment in the printing industry. The digitalisation of packaging printing — the transition from conventional analogue printing technologies including flexography, gravure, and offset lithography toward digital inkjet and electrophotographic printing — is driven by the economics of packaging production in an environment where shorter product lifecycles, more frequent promotional programmes, and the proliferation of product variants create packaging print requirements that analogue technologies optimised for long runs cannot serve efficiently. Digital inkjet printing for packaging applications has achieved commercial deployment at production speeds that make it viable for the medium-length runs that constitute the majority of packaging print volumes in consumer goods production.
The regulatory labelling requirements for food, pharmaceutical, and chemical packaging — mandating ingredient lists, allergen warnings, nutritional information, and regulatory compliance text in specific formats and languages for specific markets — are themselves a driver of digital packaging printing adoption because the version management and small-batch regulatory printing requirements that multi-market product distribution creates are economically served by digital rather than analogue printing technology. HP Indigo's electrophotographic platform for flexible packaging and label printing, Durst's and EFI's industrial inkjet platforms for corrugated and display printing, and the digital offset inkjet platforms being developed for high-volume folding carton and flexible packaging printing represent the competitive landscape of digital packaging print whose commercial momentum is shifting packaging production toward shorter runs, faster turnaround, and the variable data and personalisation capabilities that digital printing uniquely enables.
Industrial Printing: Functional Inks and Additive Electronics
The industrial printing market — the application of printing technology to manufacture functional products rather than to apply graphic information to substrates — is the segment that most directly addresses the structural shift away from information printing toward physical production applications. Printed electronics — the deposition of conductive, semiconductive, and dielectric materials through inkjet, screen printing, and gravure printing processes to create electronic circuits, sensors, and displays on flexible substrates — is a manufacturing technology whose commercial applications span RFID antennas for supply chain tracking, flexible pressure and temperature sensors for medical and industrial monitoring, and the thin-film solar cells and organic LED displays whose production requires the precision deposition of functional materials at low temperatures that conventional semiconductor manufacturing processes cannot achieve on flexible substrates.
The additive manufacturing connection to the printing and imaging industry — three-dimensional printing as an extension of two-dimensional deposition technology extended into the third dimension through layer-by-layer material deposition — is a commercial development that several major printing equipment companies are pursuing as a diversification from their declining office print businesses. The ceramic, metal, and polymer material jetting processes that some 3D printing platforms use are closely related to the inkjet printing technology that the printing industry has developed over decades, and manufacturing equipment companies including Ricoh, Fujifilm, and Kyocera are positioning their printhead capabilities as enabling technologies for industrial and additive manufacturing applications that represent growth opportunities independent of the office document printing market on which their historical businesses were built.
Managed Print Services and the Recurring Revenue Transition
The managed print services market — in which printing equipment manufacturers and service providers manage the complete print infrastructure of enterprise customers on a cost-per-page or subscription basis — represents the business model adaptation that has allowed major printing equipment manufacturers to maintain recurring revenue streams despite the structural decline in print volumes that would otherwise reduce consumable consumption proportionally. The managed print service model converts print infrastructure into a managed service with predictable total cost, optimised fleet configuration, and proactive consumable replenishment and maintenance management, capturing a larger share of total print expenditure than equipment sales and consumable sales in competitive open markets would allow. The major printing manufacturers — HP Inc., Canon, Xerox, Ricoh, and Konica Minolta — have all invested substantially in managed print services capabilities, and the managed print market has maintained revenue stability through print volume decline because the services component generates revenue that is partially independent of the volume of pages printed. The extension of managed print services toward the mid-market segment, and the integration of print security management and cloud-based fleet management into the service offering, are creating service value propositions whose commercial depth extends the managed print relationship beyond the commodity print infrastructure management that first-generation managed print services provided.