IR talks to ….. Matteo Rigamonti, Pixartprinting

Matteo, Pixartprinting is your baby – one that has grown very fast. What made you give up 75% of your equity in the company at the end of 2011 and how has that impacted the company, of which you remain president? After all, you are seen as the guiding force.

It’s had no impact so far! Because the company is doing so well it is not in the interest of the private equity company that bought my shares [Italian firm Alcedo] to move things around. And I didn’t really see Pixartprinting as my baby – it was more like a bus, it moved me from one bus stop to another place where I wanted to be. I arrived and it was time to sell. 

So how involved are you now in the decision making processes at Pixartprinting, which is continually investing in new technologies and developing its markets?

The protocol is that the management team makes proposals and we all discuss them, check the figures and decide what to do.

Earlier this year the company bought kit to enable it to expand into label production, and of course it invested in Durst’s P10 technology to significantly enlarge its wide-format production capability. How are those two projects turning out?

We invested in labels because we think that is a very interesting market. We started in this market four years ago with Indigo, but the Indigo isn’t really made for label printing so we had problems with things like scratch resistance. When I saw the Epson SurePress L-4033A at LabelExpo I was really fascinated because it was slow, but the quality of output was absolutely stunning – and it was made for labels. It meant we could do labels on a roll, which wasn’t possible with our Indigos so we decided to make a big investment. We started with a single machine, which delivered beyond expectation so we are installing a second machine by the end of October.

In terms of wide-format, we decided to invest in Durst P10s because it’s incredible how a company in the middle of the mountains is able to build the best large-format presses in the world. The company has created the P10, which works perfectly from the first day. I think it must be some kind of alien technology!

We stated with the roll-to-roll model [the Rho P10 320R] in May this year and we now have three of them [the other two installed in June]. We said to Durst we’d try the flatbed model [Rho P10 200] so we started doing that in June too. We were so satisfied because the quality was stunning, really beautiful and even better than on the Durst machines we had before. So we decided to give them back the three old HS machines and buy three more P10 flatbeds [being installed this month, November] because they are incredible. In particular, the flatbed market - more than the roll-to-roll market – is growing so fast, maybe because the applications possibilities are wider.

As editor of a magazine for the wide-format sector, I’m bound to ask: where do you see wide-format production sitting within Pixartprinting going forward?

Right now wide-format represents 50% of our turnover. But it separates into flatbed and roll-to-roll. The roll-to-roll seems to be weak – maybe because is started first and because there’s more competition. The flatbed printing is growing so fast that it’s difficult for us to buy presses to meet the demand from our customers. We have invested in the four P10s but we already know it will be difficult to satisfy demand with only those four machines. We have requested that Durst makes us a P10 1000!

We moved the wide-format into our new building last week [early October] but not completely, because the department has grown so much during construction of the site – the building is already not big enough to contain all the wide-format machinery.

Wide-format flatbed is a promise for the future – because it’s newer and because unlike roll-to-roll applications which are two dimensional, the flatbeds present three dimensional possibilities so we can do much, much more. There are opportunities in packaging and many different areas that we are still exploring.

Let’s talk specifically about the UK! Pixartprinting has found it hard to crack this market, which is just not delivering the turnover you had hoped it would. You tried getting around the ‘Italian problem’ by forming a partnership with Precision Printing but that didn’t work out. Can you tell me, if somebody goes to pixartprinting.co.uk what happens now?

Right now we are still working with Gary Peeling at Precision Printing because our Web-to-print software was so interconnected that it’s difficult for our engineers to remove this connection – it will take a couple of more months to finish. But I think that in the end the UK situation will be that the set-up is more like our Italian, or German, or French site because it is easier to manage.

We left Gary Peeling free to do whatever he wanted to do to achieve the Pixartprinting targets in the UK – but the UK is a strange market. In China, or the United States, with one key you can you can open every door. Here in Europe you need a different key for every different country. Although we like to think we’re ‘European’ I’m not sure if we really are. I was in Scotland a couple of weeks ago and the hotel concierge was talking about me being from Europe. I thought, well you are from Europe too. But people in the UK don’t see it like that. So we have to invent something that works in every country.

When I met Gary Peeling for the first time two years ago – at an event organised by your magazine – he told me we weren’t succeeding in the UK because we were Italian. We were told British people were suspicious of us because in the collective imagination we were only able to make pizza, play mandolins and so on. Yet London is a demonstration of a multi-ethnic society that works well – it’s the best town in the world – so we tried for three years to break into the UK market but whatever we’ve done the result has been the same. I think we are not playing the song the British print producers like – we have to find the right key.

In that UK partnership the small-format work was produced on site at Precision’s factory but the wide-format was still undertaken by Pixartprinting in Italy. The intention was for wide-format production to come to the UK too and that didn’t happen. Is there a specific massage there?

No, there’s no real message there. Precision has a very big building but not big enough to fit the wide-format. That is space demanding and there just wasn’t the level of orders from the UK to justify it.

So what now for Pixartprinting and the UK?

It’s difficult to say. Now we are developing the German market and we are succeeding very well. It seemed to be a very difficult market too but now we’ve found the key to what works there. Our orders there are close to 100 per day so we are very satisfied.

We can’t focus on many different countries at the same time. Since we are still closing our partnership with Gary Peeling we have time to think about the UK – we have no idea what we will do here in the future.

That previous partnership UK was seen as a blueprint that might be rolled out in other geographical territories where you perhaps already have ‘virtual shops’ – I’m assuming that is now unlikely to happen?

I don’t think the model is really the problem – I think it’s just the country. But it is difficult working with a partner abroad. I think that in the future we will print everything directly ourselves and have a presence in other countries but not in terms of a relationship with a print producer. So we would set up our own sites under the Pixartprinting name.

What do you now see as the major challenges and opportunities for Pixartprinting?

I think this market is changing and in the past it was easy to dabble and improve turnover – because from 1m Euro it is easy to do 2m Euro, from 2m Euro to 4m Euro is easy, but from 40m Euro to 80m Euro is a big challenge for us. I cannot predict the future, but the market seems to be interested in ready-to-use products. We are very successful with small packaging displays etc. Although our customers may be professional buyers and resellers they don’t like to invent – they just want to apply their graphics onto something that is already created. Many of them would also like to have the graphic work already prepared, and just put their name on it! This market is becoming lazy.

I think also that Web-to-print is slowing down because the first rush is finished – so we have to find something new for the future. I don’t know what exactly but we will find something that can work with the Web-to-print concept – I don’t see us calling customers. The market has changed forever.

An edited version of this interview is avaialble as a video.