The price spiral in online print

After a brief breather, prices in online print picked up again in the fourth quarter of 2022. According to the current ZOPI – the Zipcon Online Print Price Index – in the fourth quarter of 2022, new highs were reached in November of last year, followed by only a slight decline in December. Looking at the details, however, there have also been downward outliers, at least for flyers.

As 2023 really gets going, it is important to take another look at the past year with the latest ZOPI. While the Corona pandemic and the measures that accompanied it were scaled back step by step, the war in Ukraine shook the economy in Germany and around the world to its foundations – and will probably continue to do so in the new year.

Exploding energy prices in particular have dominated the discussion among private households and companies alike – and the last quarter of 2022 was no different. Over the year as a whole, energy products became 34.7% more expensive on average, as recently announced by the Federal Statistical Office. In 2021, energy was already 10.4% more expensive than in the previous year.

Overall, inflation in Germany fell by 0.8 percentage points at the end of December, but is still at a very high level of +8.6%. Calculated over the year as a whole, it stood at +7.9% in 2022, well above the figure of +3.1% in the previous year.

This is not leaving companies in the printing industry unscathed, as is regularly demonstrated by the economic telegram published by the Bundesverband Druck und Medien (German Printing and Media Industries Federation). Although the assessment of the business climate recently remained at the level of the previous month, the business situation itself was again assessed as worse. At the same time, companies were more positive about the new year.

But how did the online print shops fare in the fourth quarter of 2022? In general, now as in the past, companies that have transformed digitally at an early stage are more resilient to developments in the market and can adapt more quickly and flexibly. Nevertheless, they had to react to the increased prices of energy and raw materials just like everyone else. So what does that mean in concrete terms? The latest Zipcon Onlineprint Price Index demonstrates this.

After slight stagnation, the price spiral is once again moving upwards At the end of September 2022, it still looked as if the prices for the print products surveyed in the ZOPI had reached their maximum, and even exceeded it. But what looked like the beginning of a plateau was, in retrospect, only a brief respite. As early as October, prices rose again for almost all suppliers included in the ZOPI, and even more so for the shopping basket than for flyers. However, first things first.

Detailed analysis of flyers

The Zipcon Online Print Price Index covers a total of nine suppliers in the flyer product group: Vistaprint, Wirmachen-Druck, Unitedprint/print24, Onlineprinters, Flyeralarm, Saxoprint, Onlinedrucken, Redprintgroup and sourc-e. All of them were asked to