What do you think will the greatest opportunity for and threat to printers next year?
The variable digital market, in particular colour, is really gathering pace now within small to medium size organisations. The blue chips have been using variable data for a while but, in my opinion, the market is opening up within other organisations embracing the technology, organisations with smaller turnovers who can see the benefit of investing in print.

The greatest threat to printers next year are other printers. We're currently trading in one of the year's toughest months and some of the pricing we're coming up against is ludicrous. The capacity is clearly still too high (maybe because of this pre-packed administration epidemic) and so I expect, with next year's government belt tightening, to see many more printers going out of business.

What do you believe is the most under-recognised aspect in printing that is likely to become more important in 2010?
Variable digital cross media production. Printers have to realise that we need to be generating print, not waiting for it to fall into our laps. There's thousands of companies out there who could genuinely benefit from variable print and as a result, through demonstration of positive ROI, we don't need to cut our throats to win work.
 
How important do you think Ipex will be?
I find Ipex interesting from a development point of view, i.e. seeing what is coming to market, where the technical aspect of our industry is heading. But I feel, unless you're buying equipment these events can be somewhat tedious. I think, with the wider problems in print at the moment, Ipex is not particularly important at all.

What can the industry do to increase its profile next year?
The pre-pack situation is getting completely out of control. Printers and the people who run them need to realise their actions have severe moral consequences and far reaching financial impacts on the rest of the industry. There has to be natural wastage from the industry, we all know that, yet every time one of these companies rises again we're keeping the over capacity and passing the debts onto paper companies and other suppliers. It is down right unfair and unless we sort this problem we're left with a trade with a low profile.

What will you do differently next year?
Printflow had an excellent 2009 and so I exoect we'll be building on this in 2010. We won't be doing anything drastically different but we will be focusing more on cross-media work through our Cross Media Communications Ltd business.