Widthwise 2024


Q14. What are the three greatest concerns for your business in 2024?


Energy costs The UK economy


Cost of print supplies Cashflow


Print prices Funding


Political instability


Staff recruitment/retention Environmental regulation


1% 15% 10%


8% 7%


53% 38% 66% 79%


Q15. How will your workforce change over the next two years? 61%


Stay the same Increase Reduce


35% 4%


Q16. Is your business experiencing supply chain disruption? 51%


No Yes


49%


labour the point, 46% of providers reported sales of less than £1m.) As in previous years, the top priority


- selected by 34% of respondents - was to grow turnover, while 19%, perhaps dis- playing their confidence that the market was coming back to something like nor- mal, were keen to improve their margins. (More evidence of returning normality is that less than half of companies - 49% to be precise - had suffered supply chain disruption in the past year which, as high as it is, is significantly better than in 2023 when 65% experienced it.) An enterpris- ing minority of print service providers believe that the best way to grow their business is to enter new markets (28%), develop new applications (19%) or make an acquisition (10%).


And yet, for four out of ten wide-format


printers, the main focus is to improve workflow efficiencies. Te fact that has been high on the industry’s agenda since the first Widthwise survey, back in 2008, can be read in three ways: it’s possible that print service providers have tried and (in their own judgement) failed; not tried that hard (talked the talk, not walked the walk) or that technology keeps developing at such a pace they feel they can still do better. (By the way, those options are not mutually exclusive!) If it signifies nothing else, the fact that only 2% of respondents indicated that they wanted to sell the business suggests a certain faith in the industry’s long-term future. So where does the British wide-for- mat print industry go from here? The


Widthwise survey suggests that com- panies have, at least, passed the Amer- ican novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test of first-rate intelligence, in that they can hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still function. They can see the future is uncertain but act as if it isn’t. Given the many spanners thrown in the works over the past few years - by Covid-19, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, reckless bankers, Brexit (no political judgement implied but it was still an unexpected outcome) and, let’s be honest, disinfor- mation on social media - wide-format print providers in the UK have shown remarkable sangfroid. They have drilled down on the things they can change, sidelined the things they can’t, and just gone on with it.


www.imagereports.co.uk | Widthwise 2024 | 13


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