On September 18th / 20th 2019, the 22nd IMPSGA meeting took place in Germany at the invitation of Soennecken.
Christof Rösch of Soennecken welcomed the attendees to Overath, and presented an overview of Soennecken Group’s business. Soennecken Group grew revenue by 14% in 2018, well ahead of the market.
A supplemental achievement was the recently launched and very innovative Work Lab initiative, to encourage employees to come up with new business ideas. This initiative has been very well received, and has generated a lot of good new ideas. The IMPSGA group was hosted there and everybody felt it was different and an improvement.
Soennecken also gave members a tour of their very impressive facilities, including the highly automated distribution centre.
Armor and MyQ sponsored the event; both gave presentations.
MyQ focussed on the personalisation of their dashboard for individual users or groups, and their credit management tool for users paying for prints (e.g. university students).
Armor presented their new MPS service, to help partners take over and manage existing multi-vendor (mainly A4) fleets. Armor provides a complete service including supplies, maintenance and parts. This is available so far mainly in France, but Armor is looking to extend it to other countries.
OEM and Market Trends Update
SJS and JLS gave a presentation on market trends, highlighting the dip in revenues and profitability for almost all OEMs at the beginning of 2019. In particular, most manufacturers were reporting significant drops in supplies revenues. Although short term adjustment factors were partly responsible in some cases, this underlined the challenges facing the industry, with on-going declines in print volumes and increasing competition from third party supplies companies, especially the Chinese manufacturers.
There were two very interesting debates out of this. One was about the members’ view on the potential decline of pages printed due to new ways of working and not just a flat economy. The other was whether this movement is impacting customer needs between A4 and A3 devices. We will publish soon on the IDeAs site a more complete briefing on this.