Staged at Stationers' Hall in London, and sponsored by Close Print Finance, some 140 members and guests heard from a distinguished panel taken from print, paper, broadcast and marketing media.

Chaired by the BBC's Peter Day, the panel heard from  Vision in Print and Pindar chairman Andrew Pindar, who said the UK print was incredibly fragmented, and warned it could end up like the shipping industry in terms of its future state.

As a private company Pindar has invested 65m in its own business over the past year, but he warned that competition was coming from so many different areas, that even his own company's profits had dropped by a third.

Premier Paper chief executive in waiting Martyn Eustace lead the case for paper, and said new markets were now opening up for substrates, such as the increase in home usage. Paper is also now found on most supermarket shelves.

The paper merchanting market, which he said accounted for 65% of all paper sales in the UK, had changed in recent years to become dominated by three major groups.

Print would inevitably feel a change from this consolidation he said, which has seen the merchants concentrate on returns on investment and cashflow, instead of volume and tonnage.

Overcapacity and interest rate rises were a time bomb waiting to explode for those printers close to the edge he warned.

Cambridge University Press chief executive Stephen Bourne warned of the shift of print to the outer reaches of Europe and also Russia and China.

The rising cost of UK labour was also adding to the problem, he felt.

Another concern was also funding for education, which he said, could end up being misery for printers.

When the panel took questions from the audience the problems of attracting people into the industry was once again discussed, with print still not being seen as a sexy manufacturing industry to be in.

Eustace suggested that if the threat of new Europe such as Poland turned out to be a cheaper alternative then the answer may be to move some of your business closer to it.

In an imaginary scenario given 20m to spend on their own businesses, Eustace quipped that he would spend it on buying a bigger boat, as he was getting fed up with his garden.

Pindar said he would spend it on funding to expand the company's Alphagraphics chain of print shops.

The next event will be a newspaper debate on the future of printed media on 8 November.

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