It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, as grandma used to say. So it's good to see that the downturn is resulting in some manufacturing jobs actually being repatriated to Britain.

A couple of recent announcements in the inkjet space have seen Domino relocate two assembly facilities from California and Denmark back to the UK, and another of its manufacturing operations from Canada to Rotherham.

Meanwhile Xaar said it would shift about 100 jobs from its plant in Sweden to Huntingdon when it announced its results earlier this week. It's curious because I remember feeling piqued back in 2001 when the company announced it would focus high-volume production in Sweden rather than the UK, so it's funny how things can turn around.

While these job gains may be small beer in the general scheme of things, all such news has to be good news.

On a separate topic, I was also struck by the comment in Xaar's statement about inkjet adoption being frustratingly slow. I don't think this is particularly surprising - look how long it took for the revolutionary digital printing kit launched by Indigo and Xeikon back in 1993 to really take off. Major technology shifts don't happen overnight, and inkjet is making some significant strides right now with key installations such as the one at CPI looming. For Xaar to say that inkjet take-up is hampered because "numerous non-digital OEMs have substantial vested interests based on their equipment, service and maintenance revenues reliant on traditional printing technologies" appears somewhat naïve. What did they expect these competitors to do? Roll over while holding up a white flag with "we're toast go buy something else" written on it?