Complete Story
04/19/2022
Printing Industry Performance & Insights Study
April 25, 2022 - Survey Opens
May 9, 2022 - Survey Closes
May 23, 2022 - Results Released
The April 2022 PIPI study will seek to identify effective sales/marketing approaches for different types of printing companies (strategic groups). Completing the survey may prompt printing firm leaders to consider other marketing, sales management, and social media marketing strategies. This survey should only take 12 minutes to complete.
Reasons to Participate
- More participation enhances the reliability and value of the knowledge we share from our studies.
- More participation will strengthen our studies’ positive impact on our industry. The healthier our industry is, the better it is for all association members.
- Taking our surveys may provoke constructive thoughts. Multiple association members reported that our questions prompted them to consider options they had not considered before.
Benefits for Association Members
- Provides industry outlook from printing company leaders’ perspective. This may help printing company leaders when considering expansion.
- Provides financial benchmarks, which help when making strategic decisions to improve performance.
- Provides actionable knowledge about what management practices are effective and worth an investment of time and effort. For example, is “budgeting” connected with high performance? As most printing company leaders wear multiple hats, knowing what management practices best enhance performance is helpful.
- Provide insights as to what approaches work best for various management practices. For instance, our October 2021 study shared what HR approaches high-performing printing firms were applying.
- Our industry is very diverse; web printers focused on catalogs differ from digital printers that provide ancillary services. Our goal, with enough participation, is to address the topics above from the perspective of different “strategic groups.” For instance, web printers focused on catalogs and digital printers that provide ancillary services will have different financial benchmarks and effective management practices.
Results of the January Studies
Key Takeaways
- Through cluster analysis, we identified groups that seem to reflect our industry well.
- We report revenue growth, profit, and ROA, averages for each group. It appears each group is growing and producing profits, which speaks well for our industry.
- It appears the application of sheetfed printing may affect the difference between EBITDA and net profit, along with ROA – discussed in more detail below.
- We report the number of employees per million dollars of annual revenue for each group, and those numbers are generally close among four of our five groups. However, group four – focusing on specialized labels – appears to use fewer employees per million dollars in annual revenue than the other four groups.
- Proactively seeking ways to reduce cost often appeared as a strategic focus of high-performing firms in different groups.