New EFI CEO Bill Muir emphasised EFI’s commitment to “keeping the innovation engine alive and well” at his first keynote speech at Connect 2019, the US company’s annual user conference in Las Vegas.
Joking that this was Day 99 of his employment and that he was expected to take responsibility for everything from Day 100, Mr Muir focused on the accelerating rate of change that technology has brought in the last 30 years, saying that technology develops exponentially while businesses grow logarithmically, which can lead to a potentially dangerous “bifurcation” between a company and its customers.
While giving away nothing in terms of specific product announcements, he praised the “managerial courage” it had taken to pivot EFI’s business from the original Fiery platform via the Print Café project of the early 2000s to the company’s success in the wide-format sector in more recent years. He pointed out that the rumours of print’s demise had been exaggerated and that although the industry’s total value has yet to reach the peak of 2007, it has been growing consistently at a compound rate of 1.5% since 2011.
Within that headline figure are some contradictory trends: while litho dropped by nearly 47% between 2006 and 2018, digital print almost doubled in value and value-added services grew by just over 40%. The latter category currently represents around a fifth of sales and is expected to grow to a quarter in two years, so it’s not hard to see where EFI will focus its efforts. Quoting a range of business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and more unexpectedly, Michelangelo, Mr Muir stressed that his responsibility was to help keep the innovations coming to help EFI’s customers in their businesses.
By focusing on company culture and “customer obsession”, he said that the third factor that he had to worry about – capital – ‘would take care of itself’.
Product-specific announcements are anticipated on the second day of the conference.
