1. Mr. Vanhooren, worldwide the graphic arts industry is undergoing big changing processes in term of market structure and in terms of technology. How does this affect the business of your company?

Like every other player in the graphic arts industry, Agfa Graphics will be faced with challenges in the years to come. The media landscape becomes more and more diverse. Mobile and e-media are taking position next to printed media. The ‘information consumer’ is approached in new and creative ways and cross-media communications are becoming part of our daily life. They add value to both the information consumer and the information provider, that print alone is not able to offer.

Notwithstanding these developments and knowing that printed media is challenged in many applications, I firmly believe that printed media still are, and will remain, an essential and powerful communication medium.

The graphic arts industry has a tradition of change. In the coming years the process of creating print will become more sustainable, with improved quality and higher productivity. Agfa Graphics is actively playing a key role in this respect with e.g. our next-generation digital offset plate making systems. The shift to digital media will also be substantially different in some parts of the world. The need for print is largely driven by gross domestic product (GDP) increase, as well as by growth in population and literacy rates. In addition, it needs to be pointed out that the kind of content and its value for the end-user will also determine to what extent printed media will be challenged by electronic or mobile media, and at which speed.

There is another part of our industry, however, that will be affected far less by the prominence of digital media: the so-called ‘industrial printing’ segment. With applications ranging from billboards, point of sales (POS), indoor and outdoor signage and displays over flexible packaging, labels, folding cartons to decoration, textiles and various other industrial information display applications, it is obvious that alternatives don't always exists. For many of these applications, it is evident that printing will maintain a strong position for the foreseeable future and the progress in printing technologies will open up new and even disruptive perspectives. We invest in this industry with our industrial inkjet printing solutions.

In essence we believe that print will certainly survive, and print may have even more applications in the future than in the past. I believe this is not only true in the growth markets for print, but also where we consider growth to be restrained and challenged today.