CATEGORY UPDATE
The print industry has taken a massive hit during the pandemic, but the sector is adapting quickly to minimise disruption to all involved – by David Holes
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www.opi.net
dapt and survive seems to have been the collective mantra of the print industry as it grappled with the immense turmoil caused by COVID-19. With business premises and schools shut down, and employees forced to work remotely, the category had to make rapid changes to how it serviced its customers and find new operating approaches in a very different landscape.
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SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS Different parts of the printing and supplies sector got hit in various ways when COVID struck, but it was the hurried and widespread shift to homeworking that was the biggest single factor affecting them all. “It had a dramatic effect on the MPS and imaging supplies categories,” says Tony Wills, Country Director of Document Solutions for Canon in the UK & Ireland. “Unsurprisingly, as staff migrated to work from home, we saw a decline in office print requirements, and this continued throughout the pandemic period.” Sales of A3 devices, large multifunction devices and anything associated with centralised print room facilities plummeted. Simultaneously, there was a surge in the purchase of inkjet printers as businesses scrambled to get their employees set up domestically, according to Marc Pinner, Marketing Director at print supplies specialist Data Direct. “However, in the rush, they often settled for low-ticket items,” he reveals, “only to belatedly realise the true costs and inconvenience of keeping these running reliably.”
ECI’s Elise McFarlane
ECI Software Solutions, for example, saw a noticeable increase in the deployment of printing devices in the first half of last year. The company’s Global Product Portfolio Manager Elise McFarlane says that, thankfully, its hosted printing service allowed businesses to make their network printers available to home workers. Additionally, ECI’s ability to install its data collection agent software in any type of environment, helped many customers as it could be updated, configured and troubleshot remotely, removing the need for teams to be working on-site. For Epson UK, its ink subscription service ReadyPrint has become increasingly popular during the crisis due to its compatibility with
