When you’re down you’re up
Making a mockery of the grand old Duke of York doggerel, Salmat’s recent results
show the publicly listed group’s net profit for the year down over 70 per cent while recording record sales revenues, up nearly 40 per cent on the previous year.

Acquisitions were in the main responsible for the dichotomous results, demonstrating yet again that the red ink of one can often turn to the black of the other and justifying joint managing directors, Peter Mattick and Phil Salter confidently to predict that, “everything is set in place for improved sales and profitability in the next few years”. Did anyone mention the shares?

Print preferred anecdote No. 1
The NRMA, NSW’s major motoring organisation, has just gone through a somewhat
sobering exercise which spells well for the printing industry. Having offered some financial incentives to its members if 200,000 (out of a many-millions total) switch from a printed annual report to an online version, a little over a quarter so opted.

Print preferred anecdote No. 2
Recently your columnist witnessed a scene of some significance in an empty Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, a venue holding nearly 2,000 people. Before the beginning of a choral concert, a team of ushers walked among the empty rows of seats on to which they placed three separate (full colour) printed promotion pieces for other concerts later in the year. Try doing that online…..

Cost cutting is a downhill street with a cliff at the end
That phrase from a recent Wal Mart blog seemed somehow to relate to current printingindustry problems. If like so many in the industry, a printer wants to see the light at the end of the current economic and technological tunnel, the question of cutting costs needs to be approached with the same skill as a surgeon at the operating table. As an industry pundit put it recently: the cutting is rarely surgical but often resembles hacking at a business with an axe. One is reminded that everything is connected in a business and a cut in one place can mean that another function may have to pick up the slack, increasing costs in unforeseen ways.

The answer may require more depth charging than surface attacks, with perhaps an honest appraisal of the origins of the costs being examined. Some broadsides of honest rethinking may be required of the purpose of the the firm’s capital equipment and other investments that naturally flow from it. Radical it may sound, but in these changing times (read digital world) higher costs may actually be the answer if those costs produce what the marketplace wants.

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